Assessing SDGs: A New Methodology to Measure Sustainability

Abstract

SummaryThe FEEM project APPS -Assessment, Projections and Policy of Sustainable Development Goalsfocuses on the quantitative assessment of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations at the end of September 2015. The project consists of two phases. The first, retrospective, computes indicators for all SDGs in 139 countries and then derives a composite multi-dimensional index and a worldwide ranking of current sustainability. This allows informing on strengths and weaknesses of today socio-economic development, as well as environmental criticalities, all around the world. The second phase, prospective, aims at evaluating the future trends of sustainability in the world by 2030. The assessment of the SDGs is carried out by means of an extended version of the recursivedynamic computable general equilibrium ICES macro-economic model that includes social and environmental indicators. The final goal is to highlight future challenges left unsolved in next 15 years of socio-economic development and analyze costs and benefits of specific policies to support the achievement of proposed targets. This paper presents the methodology and the results of the retrospective assessment. Five main steps are described: i) screening of indicators eligible to address the UN SDGs; ii) data collection from relevant sources; iii) organization in the three pillars of sustainability (economy, society, environment); iv) normalization to a common metrics; v) aggregation of the 25 indicators in composite indices by pillars as well as in the multi-dimensional index. The final ranking summarizes countries' sustainability performance. As expected, Middle-North European countries are at top of the ranking (Sweden, Norway and Switzerland the first three), with the most industrialized European countries such as Germany and UK, however, penalized by insufficient environmental performance. Other highly developed countries are between 24 th (Canada) and 52 nd place (United States). The emerging nations are scattered in our sustainability ranking. Brazil (43

A Systemic and Contextual Framework to Define a Country’s 2030 Agenda from a Foresight Perspective

“…Aligned with these phases, the stages refer to problem definition (first phase); state of scientific research on central themes and identification of research gaps and unsolved problems (second phase); definition of the research process; and development of the systemic and contextual framework for prioritizing global targets within a long-term vision (third phase); design and conduction of a socio-technical experiment in Brazil; and discussion of the empirical results and policy implications for the country (fourth phase). During the first phase, the research problem was defined based on an exploratory review of scientific papers and guiding documents, covering the period from 2015 to 2019 [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. The reasons why we should develop a systemic and contextual framework for prioritizing global targets within a long-term vision were associated with two main concerns identified in this phase and discussed in the introductory section.…”

“…The following criteria are suggested to be used in this phase: Since the proposed framework considers the subjectivity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of experts' judgments, a fuzzy linguistic approach analog to the nine-pointed scale conceived by Saaty [26] should be used (Table 2). Very strong preference (6,7,8) 8 Preference between very strong and absolute (7,8,9) 9 Absolute preference (8,9,9) The second step aims to build the fuzzy pairwise comparison matrix showing the preference of one criterion over the other, based on the experts' judgmental values. Since the values are linguistic variables, TFNs are entered, according to the scale shown in Table 2.…”

“…Implementation of the SDG framework at the national level started in 2016, following the stages of a generic policy-planning toward global targets achievement by 2030. Since then, several guidelines, methodological assessments, conceptual models, and scientific works on this subject have been published [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Indonesian Provinces SDGs Composite Index: Lampung Province Analysis

“…The first research to construct a composite index through multi-criteria analysis was conducted during a UN summit on the SDGs. At the summit, members reduced the indicators through the screening of indicators eligible to address the UN SDGs and data collection from other relevant sources (Campagnolo et al 2015). Another case that demonstrates multi-criteria analysis (Schmidt-Traub et al 2017) is work on UN SDGs index, which presented updated and revised data annually based on the empirical relationship to subjective well-being and remaining gaps in data and analysis.…”

An Analysis of Best Practice Patterns for Corporate Social Responsibility in Top IT Companies

“…For example, Table 7 shows the one used for the pattern ENV1. Moreover, as suggested previously [35], we also evaluated sustainability by assessing Sustainable Development goals (SDG) defined by the United Nations [36]; referenced in Appendix B. We decided to extend this methodology by including the evaluation of the Paris Agreement Objectives [37] where possible.…”