National baselines for the Sustainable Development Goals assessed in the SDG Index and Dashboards

By G. Schmidt-Traub, C. Kroll, Katerina Teksoz, David Durand-Delacre, J. Sachs. 2017

532 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Sustainable Development Goals map out a broad spectrum of objectives. Analytical tools in form of the Index and Dashboards provide a starting point to set national baselines, and allow comparison of the SDGs with other indices of well-being. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — agreed in 2015 by all 193 member states of the United Nations and complemented by commitments made in the Paris Agreement — map out a broad spectrum of economic, social and environmental objectives to be achieved by 2030. Reaching these goals will require deep transformations in every country, as well as major efforts in monitoring and measuring progress. Here we introduce the SDG Index and Dashboards as analytical tools for assessing countries' baselines for the SDGs that can be applied by researchers in the cross-disciplinary analyses required for implementation. The Index and Dashboards synthesize available country-level data for all 17 goals, and for each country estimate the size of the gap towards achieving the SDGs. They will be updated annually. All 149 countries for which sufficient data is available face significant challenges in achieving the goals, and many countries' development strategies are imbalanced across the economic, social and environmental priorities. We illustrate the analytical value of the index by examining its relationship with other widely used development indices and by showing how it accounts for cross-national differences in subjective well-being. Given significant data gaps, scope and coverage of the Index and Dashboards are limited, but we suggest that these analyses represent a starting point for a comprehensive assessment of national SDG baselines and can help policymakers determine priorities for early action and monitor progress. The tools also identify data gaps that must be closed for SDG monitoring.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc8757c59d6cf0d6d9ef6c42ee37fccd0a7216fd

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Citations in the corpus

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Are we successful in turning trade-offs into synergies? (2019, background): “An association is considered to have at least moderate relationship when the rho value is >0.5 or −0.5 (Smarandache, 2009).”
Initial progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): a review of evidence from countries (2018, methodology): “indicators of progress or performance) to enable countries to take stock of their current standing, to assess priorities, and to undertake ex ante impact assessment of policies, where science is used to inform policy design (Schmidt-Traub et al. 2017).”
Aligning the Criteria of Green Economy (GE) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to Implement Sustainable Development (2019, background): “The literature on SDG implementation has evidently disclosed general policy development, the implementation and practice of SDGs, and the measurement of ex-ante impact of their mandatory conditions [31,32].”
Quantitative assessment of agricultural sustainability reveals divergent priorities among nations (2021, unknown): “This calculation method for the dimensional andtheoverallscorehasbeenusedbyindicatorsystemssuchasSDGsIndex 60 , Schmidt-Traub et al., 61 and Xu et al. 62 While this aggregation method is imperfect, it provides a useful visual overview of the status of overall agricultural…”
Trade-offs between social and environmental Sustainable Development Goals (2018, background): “However, countries’ strategies are often imbalanced between social and environmental priorities (Schmidt-Traub et al., 2017).”
Translating Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interdependencies into Policy Advice (2019, background): “The second limitation relates to issues of operationalization: the data needed to empirically assess interlinkages between the SDGs in a comprehensive manner are not always available [31].”