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Watts et al. Carbon Footprints 2025, 4, 27 Carbon Footprints
DOI: 10.20517/cf.2025.20

Original Article Open Access

Lack of digital twin policy as a barrier to

sustainability, carbon targets, and sdg achievement

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Greg Watts , Mustapha Munir , Jason Underwood , Derek Hales , Mo Maleki Sadabad , Teslim Balogun ,
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Paul Coates , Liz Lim 2
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Department of Engineering, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BX, UK.
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School of Science, Engineering, and Environment, University of Salford, Manchester M5 4WT, UK.
Correspondence to: Dr. Greg Watts, Department of Engineering, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BX,
UK. E-mail: G.N.Watts@Salford.ac.uk
How to cite this article: Watts, G.; Munir, M.; Underwood, J.; Hales, D.; Sadabad, M. M.; Balogun, T.; Coates, P.; Lim, L. Lack of
digital twin policy as a barrier to sustainability, carbon targets, and sdg achievement. Carbon Footprints 2025, 4, 27. https://dx.
doi.org/10.20517/cf.2025.20
Received: 22 Apr 2025 First Decision: 2 Jul 2025 Revised: 29 Jul 2025 Accepted: 15 Sep 2025 Published: 9 Oct 2025
Academic Editors: Mengyao Han, Liang Dong Copy Editor: Ping Zhang Production Editor: Ping Zhang

Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a comprehensive set of targets aimed at improving global
conditions, including a focus on reducing carbon footprints. Adopting Digital Twin (DT) technology will aid the
achievement of the SDGs. However, there is an inconsistent procurement and policy environment around the
development of DTs that can be problematic for those striving to achieve the SDGs. There exists a paucity of
research around the interconnections of national policy, DTs, and SDG achievement. This paper addresses this gap
by ascertaining how procurement and policy environments impact DT adoption, and in turn how DT adoption can
serve to help or hinder SDG achievement. Adopting an interpretivist ontological methodology, this inductive
research explores the perceptions of DTs and SDGs as independent concepts (stage one and two), before further
interviews are conducted (stage three) which focusses on how DTs and SDGs interact with one another. In total,
twenty-five semi-structured interviews with leading professionals are conducted, with narrative analysis utilised as
a means of interview structure and analysis. Analysis of the results found there is an inconsistent global policy and
procurement environment. In the UK this is hindering DT adoption. Whilst numerous SDG strategies exist, these
strategies are often undermined by wider government policy limitations and contractor practices. This original
paper calls for an immediate re-think of national policies on DT development, without which, SDG achievement
strategies will ultimately be doomed to fail.

Keywords: Collaboration, communication, government policy, innovation, sustainability

© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, for any purpose, even commercially, as
long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and
indicate if changes were made.

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