Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represents the first globally agreed framework to address human development and environmental stewardship in an integrated way. One approach to summarising national SDG status is our “barometer for inclusive sustainable development in South Africa”. The barometer downscales global social and planetary boundaries to provide status and trends for 20 critical indicators of environmental stress and social deprivation. In this paper, we explore the sub-national heterogeneity in sustainable development indicators by creating barometers defining the ‘safe and just operating space’ for South Africa’s nine provinces. Our results show that environmental stress varies significantly and provinces need to focus on quite different issues. Although generally environmental stress is increasing, there are areas where it is decreasing, most notably, marine harvesting. Social deprivation results show more of a pattern with high levels of deprivation in employment, income and safety across the provinces, and historically disadvantaged provinces showing the most deprivation overall. Although deprivation is generally decreasing, there are notable exceptions such as food security in six provinces. Our provincial barometers and trend plots are novel in that they present comparable environmental and social data on key indicators over time for all South Africa’s provinces. They are visual tools that communicate the range of key challenges and risks that provincial governments face, and are non-specialist and accessible to a range of audiences. In addition, the paper provides a critical case study of spatial disaggregation of national data that is required for the SDGs implementation.
Highlights
Environmental sustainability, poverty eradication and reducing inequality pose continuing challenges for African countries in the twenty-first century
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) build upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but importantly for Africa, many African governments and civil society organisations were closely involved in the process of defining the SDGs
In 2014 we developed and described a ‘national barometer for inclusive sustainable development for South Africa’ to propose a manageable set of national-level indicators and boundaries that are relevant in the South African context (Cole et al 2014)
Summary
Environmental sustainability, poverty eradication and reducing inequality pose continuing challenges for African countries in the twenty-first century. Population growth and global environmental change are expected to strain natural resources even further creating an urgent need to solve sustainability challenges across the continent (Gasparatos et al 2016). The SDGs build upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but importantly for Africa, many African governments and civil society organisations were closely involved in the process of defining the SDGs. In addition, the 169 targets include means of. Sustain Sci (2017) 12:829–848 implementation, i.e. finance, capacity building and technology transfer to developing countries. With over 230 global indicators (IAEG-SDG 2015) and many more national indicators to be developed, there is a need for tools to summarise and communicate progress on the SDGs and highlight national priorities. Some initial attempts have already been made with a SDG index for OECD countries (Kroll 2015), a regional SDG scorecard (Nicolai et al 2015) and a SDG Index and Dashboard for all countries (Sachs et al 2016)
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