Environmental Justice in the Sustainable Development Goal Era: Inclusive and Transformative Policy Architectures

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) place social inclusion and ecological protection within a shared international agenda, yet aggregate progress indicators can obscure unequal exposure to environmental harm, unequal access to benefits and unequal influence over decisions. This critical narrative review examines how environmental justice can be made operational across interconnected policies for pollution control, climate adaptation, energy transition, conservation and development. Literature published principally from 2015 to 23 August 2026 was interpreted alongside foundational scholarship and authoritative institutional instruments. The synthesis distinguishes distributive, procedural, recognitional, restorative and intergenerational dimensions of justice; critically compares empirical evidence across urban and rural settings; and assesses whether policy architectures create enforceable duties rather than merely participatory aspirations. Evidence consistently documents patterned disparities in air pollution, heat exposure and environmental decision-making, although geographical coverage, exposure measurement and causal identification remain uneven. Climate and conservation interventions can reduce aggregate environmental pressures while displacing costs towards marginalised communities, particularly where land tenure, affordable housing, labour protections or effective remedies are weak. SDG interactions therefore cannot be assumed to be uniformly beneficial: apparently successful sectoral programmes may produce inequitable outcomes across places, groups or generations. The review proposes an integrated architecture linking disaggregated diagnostics, meaningful decision-making authority, enforceable safeguards, distributive fiscal choices, remedy mechanisms and independent evaluation. This proposal is an analytical synthesis, not a validated universal model. Priority research needs include longitudinal causal evaluations, community-defined indicators, stronger evidence from underrepresented regions and comparative tests of policy enforcement. Environmental justice in the SDG era is best understood as an assessable property of institutions, distributional outcomes and power relations, rather than a descriptive label attached to environmental programmes.