Making Regional Sense of Global Sustainable Development Indicators for the Arctic

Annika E Nilsson,Joan Nymand Larsen

doi:10.3390/su12031027

Abstract

Since the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015, efforts are underway to identify indicators for monitoring progress. However, perceptions of sustainability are scale and place specific, and there has also been a call for Sustainable Development Goals and indicators that are more relevant for the Arctic than the global perspectives. Based on earlier and ongoing efforts to identify Arctic Social Indicators for monitoring human development, insights from scenario workshops and interviews at various locations in the Barents region and Greenland and on studies of adaptive capacity and resilience in the Arctic, we provide an exploratory assessment of the global SDGs and indicators from an Arctic perspective. We especially highlight a need for additional attention to demography, including outmigration; indigenous rights; Arctic-relevant measures of economic development; and social capital and institutions that can support adaptation and transformation in this rapidly changing region. Issues brought up by the SDG framework that need more attention in Arctic monitoring include gender, and food and energy security. We furthermore highlight a need for initiatives that can support bottom–up processes for identifying locally relevant indicators for sustainable development that could serve as a way to engage Arctic residents and other regional and local actors in shaping the future of the region and local communities, within a global sustainability context.

Highlights

IntroductionSince the United Nations adopted the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 [1], major efforts have been launched to monitor progress with the help of indicators [2,3,4], which in turn has inspired critical assessments of indicator frameworks [5,6]
We summarize the insights from the Arctic-specific assessments of each of the 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including attention to targets and indicators
Sustainable development has been a topic in Arctic politics since the mid-1980s, including articulations of indigenous perspectives on sustainability and as a framing in the negotiations of circumpolar cooperation [25,82,83,84,85]

Summary

Introduction

Since the United Nations adopted the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 [1], major efforts have been launched to monitor progress with the help of indicators [2,3,4], which in turn has inspired critical assessments of indicator frameworks [5,6]. The SDGs are explicitly global in scope and meant to apply to all countries, where the indicators are the major tool for following up on the national implementation of this global policy framework. The SDG process has been criticized for representing a top–down “cockpit-ism”, followed by calls for mobilizing new agents of change rather than relying on governments and intergovernmental organizations [8]. If the goal is to engage local society and subnational decision makers in a sustainable development transition, it is necessary to ensure that the goals for sustainable development and the indicators to follow up on the goals are perceived as relevant for a range of local environmental and societal contexts

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Conclusion