Despite near-global consensus on Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, unresolved and politically contentious trade-offs have undermined implementation. It is widely agreed that the goals will only be achieved if trade-offs are addressed and transformed. This is the subject of the GOVTROFF project, recently awarded the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. Working together with the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern and the University of Arizona, Dr. Elke Kellner aims to understand how complex multi-level trade-offs are addressed in multi-actor, multi-interest governance systems at UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and how they can be transformed to meet emergent 21st-century environmental and social threats.