National Baselines for Integrated Implementation of an Environmental Sustainable Development Goal Assessed in a New Integrated SDG Index

David Horan

doi:10.3390/su12176955

Abstract

Most indicator-based assessments of progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focus on identifying priorities for implementation. However, once priorities are established, policymakers are called to implement them in an integrated way which requires progress not just on a Goal’s targets (siloed approach) but also progress in interrelated policy areas. To assess baselines for integrated implementation, this article introduces a new family of SDG index based on a Goal’s targets and first-order interrelations with other goals that divides targets linked to the prioritized or focal SDG into pressure, impact, and response components. Focusing on an application to SDG14, the conservation and sustainable use of marine resources, an important priority for many small island developing states, the article develops an integrated SDG14 (I-SDG14) index based on an international study of SDG14 interlinkages with indicators selected from SDSN’s global indicator set for all island states with sufficient data available for the year 2018. While all island states assessed face challenges on SDG14, top-performers in terms of I-SDG14 (United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland and Iceland) tend to face greater challenges on pressures, primarily reflecting their performance on targets related to SDGs 2, 12, 13 and 15, whereas bottom-performers (Timor-Leste, Vanuatu, Haiti, Jamaica and Comoros) tend to face greater challenges on responses, i.e., country capacities to influence SDG14, owing to their status on targets related to SDGs 4, 9, 16 and 17. In particular, country scoreboards, “traffic-light” visual representation of performance, and radar-diagrams are used to investigate country-level strengths and challenges for integrated implementation. The proposed index offers a useful starting point to frame discussions with different stakeholders around integrated approaches to implementation and can be flexibly applied to other SDGs and contexts. The article concludes with several suggestions for future research aimed at improving integrated assessments for the SDGs.

Highlights

To guide national planning and policies for sustainable development, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) offer a broad framework of 17 SDGs and 169 targets spanning a range of sectors such as poverty, health, energy, climate, marine, justice, that is universal in scope, applying to rich and poor countries alike [1,2]
To provide an evidence-based framework for implementation, the UN Inter Agency Expert Group (IAEG) proposed the global indicator set of 232 official indicators [3] and aided by this development, indicator-based assessments, as prime assessors of progress on the SDGs, have become common practice at all scales [4,5,6]
Compared to the SDG index of Sachs and associates which focuses on all SDGs and ignores linkages between them, the index developed in this paper focuses on a single “focal” SDG, called SDGx, e.g., SDG14, and its first-order interlinkages with other goals

Summary

Introduction

To guide national planning and policies for sustainable development, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) offer a broad framework of 17 SDGs and 169 targets spanning a range of sectors such as poverty, health, energy, climate, marine, justice, that is universal in scope, applying to rich and poor countries alike [1,2]. The article uses the SDGs as a framework for the integrated assessment basing indicator selection on scientific evidence of SDG interrelations. A sound procedure for indicator selection based on evidence of interlinkages and simple causal framework for structuring interlinked indicators makes for an important management tool for developing coordinated implementation strategies, allocating resources and tracking progress in interrelated policy areas. This article suggests the SDGs provide a relatively simple yet comprehensive and flexibly applicable intermediate framework, between siloed approaches and fully integrated frameworks, if indicator selection is based on scientific studies of interlinkages with the issues of interest [19,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37].

Deriving an I-SDGx Index Based on a PIR Framework

Results

Conclusions