Telecoupled environmental impacts are an obstacle to meeting the sustainable development goals

International trade is responsible for connecting human and natural systems across distant countries, and has profound implications for sustainability. In particular, telecoupling, the socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant countries as a result of, among others, global trade, typically leaves less affluent nations bearing the largest environmental impacts. Telecoupling effects are likely to be pervasive to those trying to achieve the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but little is known about how telecoupling affects the SDGs beyond a subset of environment-related targets. Here, we take a broad global network analysis approach to address this gap, and assess the vulnerability of the SDGs' indicators and their interactions to telecoupling across 180 countries. We find that a majority (similar to 78%) of the SDG indicators are significantly correlated (p-value <.05) to indicators of telecoupled environmental impacts, indicating that higher performing countries under SDGs indicators do so helped by externalizing their environmental impacts. We also find that, by proactively accounting for telecoupling, connectivity between goals is reduced in 11 of the 17 SDGs, reducing the trade-offs between environmental-related and development SDGs in developing countries. Our results reinforce the need for better integration of telecoupling when monitoring progress towards the SDGs for development to be truly sustainable and equitable.