Introduction
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Multilateral Environment Agreements (MEAs) and other information related to the environmental drivers, state, pressures, impacts and responses underpin the methodology of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) process. Additionally, the GEO captures linkages with socio-economic development which are useful for better contextualizing the environment and for understanding the nexus between the environment, people and the economy. The GEO also provides a summary of recommendations and policy implications based on the assessment.
Measuring Progress is a derivative product of the sixth report in the GEO series (GEO-6; UNEP 2019a). This publication complements the GEO and provides an overview of the current state of the environmental dimensions of sustainable development based on the SDG indicators - including the availability of statistical and spatial data, analytical methods and visualisations - and identifies knowledge and information gaps in terms of assessing progress towards the environmental dimension of the SDGs.
The Sustainable Development Goals targets and indicators
The SDGs provide a framework which elaborates the global development agenda towards achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. The 17 SDGs and 169 targets are integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. The SDGs are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership. A monitoring framework of 244 indicators has been agreed on for monitoring the SDGs. This global SDG indicator framework provides information on the most pressing global issues identified by countries; however, it does not represent a complete list of all information that is needed to understand the overall health of the planet, specific national challenges, or the interlinkages between the environmental dimension of development and the social and economic dimensions of development.
The phrase, the environmental dimension of the SDGs, does not have a precise definition and there are many different views on what the environmental dimension of development should include (e.g. should it include only those indicators related to the state of the environment or should it also include indicators related to
Sustainable Development Goal
access to natural resources such as water and indicators related to interactions between environmental indicators and the attainment of other social and economic indicators?). For this analysis, the environmental dimension of the SDGs includes the list of 93 SDGs indicators which was presented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) Secretariat to the UN Environment Assembly Committee of Permanent Representatives at the sub-committee meeting on 20 September 2018 (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP] 2018a) (see Annex 1). During the construction of this report, reviewers suggested other SDG indicators are important for the environmental dimension of the 2030 agenda, but currently the report is developed around this list of 93 indicators.
The official SDGs indicators are used as the basis for the analysis in this publication (United Nations, General Assembly [UNGA] 2017a). For indicators where no data are available, other data or information were used to summarise the state of progress for that indicator. The SDGs indicators have been classified into three Tiers by the UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group on the SDG indicators in order to summarise globally the level of data availability and methodological development. The three Tiers are defined as: “Tier 1: Indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and standards are available, and data are regularly produced by countries for at least 50 percent of countries and of the population in every region where the indicator is relevant. Tier 2: Indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and standards are available, but data are not regularly produced by countries. Tier 3: No internationally established methodology or standards are yet available for the indicator, but methodology/standards are being (or will be) developed or tested” (UN 2018a). In this publication, the Tier categorisation is summarised in Annex 1 and included in the Thematic Analysis section for reference.
Overview of the methods used for this report
The data in the Statistical Annex and in this report is based on data included in the Environment Live Global Database (UNEP 2019b). The Environment Live Global Database was established as a resource for supporting global assessments on the environment, including the Sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO6) process. For the official SDGs indicators, the data in the Environment Live Global Database is an exact match with the data in the Global SDG Indicators Database; however, the Environment Live Global Database includes additional indicators and SDG disaggregations which are not in the Global SDG Indicators Database. This database underpins much of the analysis in the GEO6 and it includes more than 1,000 indicators related to the environmental dimension of the SDGs, MEAs, other
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