At the end of September 2018 the United Nations General Assembly reconvened in New York for its 73rd session, bringing together the international community to drive progress towards the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were adopted by the General Assembly in September 2015. The 17 Goals and 169 related targets unite a wide array of social and environmental issues, including education, health and biodiversity, with an aspiration to achieve these globally by 2030. The SDGs encapsulate contemporary social and environmental concerns, and increasingly guide the development policies of Governments and corporations worldwide.

The contributions of natural ecosystems to all the SDGs, and the need for responsible, coherent policy-making mobilized around ecosystem management and the SDGs, are increasingly recognised in high-level discussions, including the Food and Agriculture Organization's latest State of the World's Forests Report. To this end, an interdisciplinary team of researchers associated with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) are asking what contributions biodiversity conservation organizations can make to the SDGs. The project, Unusual Suspects, examines the Initiative's experiences of biodiversity conservation to consider where potential to deliver the SDGs might lie, and how this could be facilitated. Drawing on project experience of colleagues in BirdLife International, Fauna & Flora International, the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, this project offers CCI unparalleled linkages between practitioner experience and academic research in environment and development.

As part of the Unusual Suspects project the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute has launched an online tool that allows conservation professionals to look at how biodiversity projects can contribute to the SDG targets. The SDG Tool (https://sdgtool.com) was developed by the Department of Geography and funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund for Conservation and the Cambridge Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account. The tool provides practitioners with a simple interactive interface that helps to navigate the complexity of the SDG targets and their links with project level interventions.

Biodiversity conservation initiatives may be the Unusual Suspects with real potential to positively support the SDGs. Bearing in mind the strong emphasis on the interconnectedness of the SDGs, more needs to be done to encourage conservation practitioners to engage with this global agenda. Biodiversity conservation and human development are two sides of the same coin, both contributing to the same global development agenda of planetary health and well-being.