The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) aim to provide humanity with a global roadmap to sustainability. Official SDG indicators have been intensively developed, and they have a prominent and pronounced role as a key monitoring and policy instrument. Furthermore, various complementary or alternative indicator sets have been introduced at the global, regional and national levels. This article focuses on the risks related to the national indicators. The analysis is based on experiences from the preparation processes of sustainable development indicators in Finland and insights from indicator professionals and stakeholders in Finland and Germany. The risks related to overuse, nonuse and misuse of indicators are analyzed from the perspectives of indicator contents, processes of production and communication and external context factors. Opportunities for avoiding different risks and improving the desired societal impacts and influences of indicator usage are discussed. The concept of risk is helpful in terms of empirical diagnosis and for formulating mitigation recommendations.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) constitute an ambitious comprehensive global framework including monitoring mechanisms and indicators to evaluate progress towards precise targets of sustainable development. Most European countries have adapted their national sustainability indicator systems to conform to the UN Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, introducing new indicators and monitoring frameworks and governance processes in which these are embedded. What do we know about the political processes and struggles of implementing this important global framework? How does the politics of indicators differ in national contexts? We propose a classification of national indicator systems along dimensions of indicator selection, appraisal landscape, participatory nature, and political communication. We empirically explore these dimensions for four European national sustainability indicator systems through a comparative analysis based on national policy documents, indicator databases, and web portals as well as inputs from workshops and expert interviews. Given the considerable variation with respect to the trajectory of national sustainability indicator systems, we posit that these differences correspond to different national interpretations of sustainability.

The transformation to a post-fossil city is one of the central urban challenges of the 21st century, with heat transition representing an important part of this process. In Germany, a structural change commission has proposed a complete phase-out of coal by 2038. For the city of Leipzig, which is located in a mining region, this opens up the possibility of a post-fossil transformation. Leipzig started an energetic retrofitting process within its housing sector several years ago, and is now planning to phase-out coal-fired district heating as early as 2023. This heat transition could turn Leipzig into one of the pioneering cities of post-fossil transformation. However, such a transition will be accompanied by numerous challenges and problems in the financial, political, technological, and labor sectors. Using the example of Leipzig, we conducted a document analysis and semi-structured interviews to investigate how a transition of the heating sector is conceptualized and planned, which governance structures have emerged, and how they work. In addition, our paper outlines the main interests and goals of the key actors and stakeholders in this transition, as well as their competences and resources. We emphasize that while Leipzig has committed itself to ambitious climate goals, up to now, the city has had no systemic approach for reducing local emissions. Although a window of opportunity has opened for a post-fossil heat transition, this still remains at a niche level due to a lack of interest, path dependencies, and weak governance.

We analyse how ambitiously the underlying targets for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030 are set in terms of their semantic formulation and discuss the implications of this for policy making. Our analysis is based on classifying ambitiousness into three types: semantic, relative and absolute ambitiousness; in this paper, we mainly analyse semantic ambitiousness. We establish an evaluation framework that shows clear differences in semantic ambitiousness levels between SDG targets. Awareness of these differences is essential, as semantic ambitiousness also lays the foundation for evaluating other types of ambitiousness of the SDGs in international cross-country comparisons and national policy making processes. We also analyse how progress towards the targets has been reported in the Sustainable Development Report of the SDG Index and in the SDGs Progress Chart of the United Nations. Finally, we discuss possible reasons for the differences in the level of ambitiousness and provide recommendations for operationalising the targets. Our aim is to provide a better understanding of the variability of interpretations that can occur in the evaluation of different SDGs, and to improve the coherence between the goals in developing any future development goal frameworks beyond Agenda 2030.

In this comment, we scrutinize how research is being challenged by the 2030 Agenda and what may be required for research to contribute to transformative change toward sustainability. Building on the current debate and state of knowledge, we argue that we need a stronger engagement with norms and values within science. Conflicting goals, values and visions need to be made explicit and taken into account in the (co-)production of knowledge in a transparent way. This requires the ability for normative reflection on the part of scientists, both about the norms at play and their own role. To produce transformative-oriented knowledge needed for the implementation of the sustainable development goals, we argue, fundamental changes are required within the science system, from the production to the assessment of knowledge.