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SDG Indicators and BS/Index: The Power of Numbers in the Sustainable Development Debate

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Abstract

Four years after the adoption of the SDGs, measuring progress towards them has been elusive. The ‘silo approach’ of pursuing each goal independently is stretched to its limit by the official Global Indicators Framework trying to count for each target, but lacking data or even agreed methodology for more than half of them. On the other hand, the attempt to reduce progress towards the SDGs to a single number ends up ignoring the many trade-offs between well-being associated to material consumption and planetary boundaries.

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Fig. 1

Source: Graph by the author with data from the BS/SDG index and UNDP’s HDI

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Notes

  1. See paragraph 47 of UN Resolution A/RES/70/1—Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, available at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld.

  2. Paragraph 21 of the ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals 2019’ report, available at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/22700E_2019_XXXX_Report_of_the_SG_on_the_progress_towards_the_SDGs_Special_Edition.pdf.

Reference

  • Sachs, Jeffrey, Guido Schmidt-Traub, Christian Kroll, Guillaume Lafortune, and Grayson Fuller. 2019. Sustainable development report 2019. New York: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). Available at: http://unsdsn.org/.

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  1. Social Watch, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Roberto Bissio

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  1. Roberto Bissio
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Correspondence to Roberto Bissio.

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Coordinator of Social Watch. A shorter version of this article was first published by Global Policy Watch.

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Bissio, R. SDG Indicators and BS/Index: The Power of Numbers in the Sustainable Development Debate. Development 62, 81–85 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-019-00202-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-019-00202-7

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