National SDG-7 performance assessment to support achieving sustainable energy for all within planetary limits

Abstract

Several gaps and limitations characterise present indicators for United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG-7), thus impeding effective policy-making. Here, we propose a holistic framework which enables the assessment of national SDG-7 performances through 29 indicators capturing environmental as well as socio- and techno-economic aspects specifically relevant to the sustainability of the energy sector. The framework is applied to 176 countries, benchmarking indicator scores against absolute sustainability thresholds and targets to gauge how far current energy systems are from reaching truly sustainable levels. Our results reveal different performance patterns across countries as well as trade-offs between social and environmental indicators. All countries are found to exert unsustainable performances for several indicators, albeit with large variability, where some environmental scores lie just above the threshold and others exceed by more than a factor of 1000. Climate change impact scores are examples of the latter, where only 52 countries located in Africa and Asia are found to possibly show performances below their thresholds. With this quantitative and holistic support at the country level, it becomes possible for policy-makers to identify, prioritise and target specific sustainability aspects to achieve SDG-7, and not just move towards it. Therefore, we recommend a broad uptake of our framework while continuing its development, including for other SDGs.