However, we need to take account of the current context. Even before COVID, the SDGs were way off track in most countries. After COVID, increasing numbers of international leaders and experts have concluded that the SDGs are a pipe dream. Even the UN Secretary General’s SDG Stimulus Plan envisages finding only another US$500 billion a year in financing. Assuming that this plan succeeds(which many sceptics doubt unless there is a fundamental change in global taxation, debt relief, or ODA efforts), this would mean that we are still US$1.9 trillion short of annual global spending needs to reach the SDGs. It is also not evident that any new money would go to LICs and LMICs, who need it most and whose share of total ODA has fallen since 2018. As a result, most countries are going to have to make some very hard choices about which of the SDGs to prioritise. In practice, most countries have already been making such choices through key political pledges by their leaders or parties in election campaigns – for example Benin and Sierra Leone focusing on water, Gabon and Sierra Leone on health. Such choices should not be made by the BWIs or the broader development partner community, but instead by participatory development of SDG acceleration/stimulus plans, so the priorities chosen may vary by country(though in similar exercises around Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, PRSPs, there was a remarkable degree of citizen consensus in almost all LICs/LMICs on top priorities: education, health, nutrition/food and water). On the other hand, it is possible for the international community to provide advice on which sectors might produce the greatest investment multipliers and impacts on growth, as well as advances in sustainable and human development. 5 Here the evidence is clear: investments in a just green transition(i.e. in reaching both the social and the environmental SDGs) produce far higher multipliers than investments in traditional infrastructure, energy, or land/sea use- both directly and indirectly, by reducing inequality and climate damage(see, for example, IMF 2021a and 2017). These greater multiplier effects would enhance countries’ debt-carrying capacity and debt sustainability. On the other hand, failure to deal with the climate and inequality crises would dramatically undermine growth and security prospects, reducing debt-carrying capacity and sustainability. It is for these reasons that the rest of this paper focuses on integrating into DSAs the top priority spending on the environmental and social SDGs. 3. Adapting Debt Sustainability Analysis to Combat the Climate Crisis 3.1 Definition and Background/History of Past Efforts This is where the IMF and World Bank have made the most advances in adapting methodology, notably in the 2020 Sovereign Risk and Debt Sustainability Framework(SRDSF) for Market-Access Countries. 3.1.1 Adapting DSAs to Climate Analysis: the SRDSF The SRDSF is the framework which has made the most systematic and comprehensive adaptations(for more details see IMF 2022b), through a climate change module with two“sub-modules”. The first of these models the impact of adaptation investments, which build resistance to the effects of climate change, the second covers climate change mitigation, which involves efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit increases in temperatures. 5 It is vital to underline that“investments” mean both recurrent and capital spending. There persists in many international agencies a preference for capital spending and an urge to reduce recurrent spending, even when it is obvious from many sectoral studies that in social and environmental sectors, recurrent spending(especially on staff wages, training and maintenance) is as vital as capital spending. See Development Finance International(2016). Series: Debt Sustainability Assessments& Their Role in the International Financial Architecture 5