Principal indicators to monitor sustainable development goals

Abstract

Hundreds of indicators are available to monitor progress of countries and regions towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the sheer number of indicators poses unprecedented challenges for data collection and compilation. Here we identify a subset of SDG indicators (principal indicators) that are relatively easy to collect data for and also are representative for all the indicators by considering the complex interrelationship among them. We find 147 principal indicators that can represent at least 90% of the annual variances of 351 SDG indicators in the past (2000–2017) and are expected to do so for the future (2018–2030) with the lowest difficulty of data collection. Our results can guide future investment in building the data infrastructure for SDG monitoring to give priorities to these principal indicators for global comparison.

Database of human well-being and eco-sustainability under planetary pressures of the Belt and Road 1990–2018

“…However, there are also some deficiencies in these existing methods. For instance, the index system method, either lacks a unified index selection standard, leading to inconsistent indexes selected by different studies and limiting the comparison between researches, or the index number is too much and complicated, resulting in difficulties in data acquisition and processing and lacking the consideration of interaction and influence relationship among indicators 24 , 25 . The indicator method, either often does not cover all the dimensions of society, economy and environment (such as single indicators, EF focuses only on the environmental dimension and does not include the economic and social dimension 26 , 27 , HDI does not consider environmental factors and intergenerational inequality 28 , 29 , leading to the evaluation results are not comprehensive enough owing to the different emphases of each method 27 ), or often covers up certain problems, for it is rarely clear or transparent 11 (such as the composite indicator, EWP can show the rate of conversion of ecological consumption into human well-being, but cannot directly show the true level of well-being 30 , 31 ).…”

Progress toward SDG‐2: Assessing food security in 93 countries with a multidimensional indicator system

“…The United Nations (UN) has set 17 SDGs that are expected to be achieved by 2030 (Chen, Shuai, & Zhao, 2023; Shuai et al, 2021; United Nations, 2016). The Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG‐2), which integrates food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture, and links to all 16 other SDGs, namely “end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture,” is considered the core of the whole set of SDGs (Chen, Shuai, & Wu, 2023; Ghosh & Sahu, 2023; Mollier et al, 2017; UN, 2016).…”

Estimating the dynamic environmental footprints of the global finance and business sector towards sustainable development goals

“…In 2015, the 193 countries of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Development Agenda titled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” which outlines 17 sustainable development goals to serve as a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future” (United Nations, 2015). Since then, the SDGs have been researched in many dimensions, including overall performance (Jain & Jain, 2020; Shuai et al, 2021, 2022; Xiao et al, 2022), specific SDGs (Chen, Shuai, & Wu, 2022; Fu, 2021; Irfan et al, 2023; Oliveira‐Duarte et al, 2021), and particular areas such as carbon emissions reduction (Kartal et al, 2022; Nurgazina et al, 2021, 2022), renewable energy (Adebayo, Kartal, et al, 2023; Adebayo, Ullah, et al, 2023; Ali et al, 2022; Kartal et al, 2023; Wu et al, 2023), technology innovation (Philip et al, 2022; Udemba, Emir, & Philip, 2022; Udemba & Tosun, 2022; Wang et al, 2023).…”