Abstract
Countries are facing the challenge of identifying the most effective implementation strategies and measures for achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) and their specific targets. The standard procedure proposed by international organizations consists of a set of indicators (one or more per target) assessed at country level. However, such country scale assessments have only limited potential for regional or national policymaking, because of aggregation and averaging effects, which limit the identification of phenomena, their causal relationships, and their spatial-temporal dynamics. The need thus emerges for defining assessment procedures that go beyond national level aggregation and zoom into local phenomena, while maintaining a link with the approach adopted at the global level for monitoring and reporting the progress towards the meeting of the SDGs. SDG 6 focuses on water resources and aims at achieving safe water and sanitation for all, which are essential to human health, environmental sustainability and economic prosperity. SDG 6 is evidently interconnected with several other SDGs, and in particular with those focused on food production (SDG2) and other socio-economic activities using water as a production factor. This paper proposes an approach to assess SDG 6, based upon freely available global data sets. The methodology is suitable for both reporting at international level in accordance with approved guidelines proposed by custodian agencies and – more importantly – analyzing the spatial features of the phenomena related to the SDGs and their targets, producing information useful to support effective sustainability oriented policies. The proposed approach is demonstrated for the assessment of the indicator 6.4.1 (Change in water use efficiency) in South and South-East Asia, with the ambition to provide operational solutions timely applicable at the global level by exploiting the ever-increasing availability of spatial information deriving from ongoing exercises in the field of global change. This will allow identifying current and emerging water management issues, such as the areas where strategies are required to increase the availability of water resources, or those necessitating transboundary strategies. Scenario analysis driven by the IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathways is developed to explore policy and technological solutions across the nexus between water management and agriculture.
Highlights
The United Nations (UN) adopted an ambitious global sustainability agenda for the period up to 2030 (UN, 2015)
There are criticisms that many suggested indicators lack comprehensive, cross-country data and some even lack agreed statistical definitions (SchmidtTraub et al, 2017), the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) adopted a set of 230 indicators proposed by the IAEGSDG on March 2016 as a practical starting point to monitor progress on the 17 goals and 169 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (Allen et al, 2017)
In order to help fill the above mentioned gaps, this study presents an approach for the spatial assessment of Water Use Efficiency (WUE; SDG indicator 6.4.1), to explore how the economic value generated by water varies within countries
Summary
The United Nations (UN) adopted an ambitious global sustainability agenda for the period up to 2030 (UN, 2015). The multiplicity of essentially noncomparable measures of sustainable development necessitates the generation of “relevant” SDG indicators so that “clear, unambiguous messages be conveyed to users” (Hák et al, 2016). In this respect, there were attempts by their drafters, the UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEGSDG), to ensure relevance. There are criticisms that many suggested indicators lack comprehensive, cross-country data and some even lack agreed statistical definitions (SchmidtTraub et al, 2017), the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) adopted a set of 230 indicators proposed by the IAEGSDG on March 2016 as a practical starting point to monitor progress on the 17 goals and 169 targets of the SDGs (Allen et al, 2017)
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