On 25 September 2015, all 193 Member States of the United Nations adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aka the Global Goals.
This book articulates a path to make these Goals appear manageable, to implement in your life, adapting the 120 indicators used by the SDG Index to the individual level. The scope of the Goals is gargantuan, ill-fitted for individual countries, let alone individual people, implying their international nature.
What follows is a loose method to apply to your life, to keep yourself accountable to your responsibility toward the Goals as a global citizen.
What is sustainable development?
Sustainable development is a way of thinking about and uniting all the complicated, yet intersecting issues we’ll come to explore ahead, centred on three pillars:
Economic growth
Social inclusion
Environmental sustainability
Three pillars of sustainable development
The genesis of the concept of sustainable development at a UN level is 1972 in Stockholm, where a UN conference linked human development with the environment. 20 years later, in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, the UN held the Earth Summit, the biggest summit of world leaders at the time, putting environmental sustainability at the forefront. From this summit came three important treaties:
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
Convention on Biological Diversity
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
20 years hence from the Rio Summit, the UN held another conference in Rio in 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Upon reflection and assessment of the above three treaties ahead of Rio+20, the scorecard of their progress was scathing. It was at this conference the impetus solidified to form what would become the SDGs.
The UN’s primary agenda from 2000 to 2015 was the era of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The concept central to the MDGs was international development, as sustainable development is to the SDGs. In 2000, a summit of world leaders at the UN Headquarters, known as the Millennium Summit, adopted the MDGs.
The MDGs were eight goals, on the topics of:
extreme poverty and hunger
universal primary education
gender equality and women’s empowerment
child mortality
maternal mortality and health
HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
environmental sustainability
global partnership
The Millenium Development Goals
In 2000, a count of those living within the definition of extreme poverty (which we’ll define in the next chapter) was 1.7 billion. At the end of the MDG period in 2015, this was down by a billion, to 750 million people. China bears most credit for this, from a worldwide height of 2 billion people in extreme poverty in 1990, when two-thirds of the Chinese population lived within the definition of extreme poverty. The period from 1990 to 2015 accounts for approximately 750 million Chinese coming out of extreme poverty to less than 1% of its population.
Though the principles of international development guided the span of the MDGs between 2000 and 2015, a sentiment grew that the MDGs needed to emphasise some key issues. Inequality within countries had become a prevailing concern, as well as strengthening the environmental component of MDG #7. Humans had been making as much money as we could, much of it at the expense of the Earth’s ability to heal itself along the way. Environmental advocates had been crying out about the human effects on nature and ecosystems for decades, but by the 2010s, it was evident the effects were catastrophic. Humanity was edging toward a cataclysm imperilling our species, as well as courting a mass extinction of other species.
In the twilight of the MDG period, the UN was considering what would follow to guide its agenda after 2015, the due date of the MDGs. The conception of sustainable development as the guiding principle for this post-2015 UN agenda took shape.
In September each year, a new session of the UN General Assembly opens to address the forthcoming agenda. The opening session of the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015 passed a UN Resolution titled Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 2030 Agenda, including the 17 Goals, now guides the UN and its member states between 2015 to 2030.
SDG Index
To better break down how to act on the 17 SDGs, the UN divides the Goals into 169 targets, and below these targets, 236 measurable official indicators. Within this book, we’ll instead use the indicators used by the SDG Index, produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).
The SDSN is the greatest source of this book, a knowledge network of universities and research institutes around the world, under UN auspices, chartered by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Much of this book is a distillation of the SDSN’s SDG Index, to which the world’s foremost academics in their respective fields have lent their knowledge and research efforts toward.
The lead authors for the 2022 SDG Index are Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Guillaume Lafortune, Professor Christian Kroll. Grayson Fuller and Finn Woelm. Also integral to the SDG Index and SDSN legacy is Guido Schmidt-Traub, former SDSN Executive Director, and co-author of the SDG Index reports from its first iteration in 2016 to 2020.
Professor Christian Kroll authored a report alongside the SDSN before the adoption of the SDGs in 2015. With a foreword by Kofi Annan, the format of the report acted as a progenitor and template of the SDG Index. Kroll’s report selected indicators well ahead of the UN, as even the Goals were yet to become official, displaying an index for scores in SDG preparedness for the rich countries.
The 2022 SDG Index consists of 120 indicators corresponding to the 17 Goals, with each country’s indicator scores combined into a composite index score and ranking. The Index score reflects a percentage of progress toward full achievement of all Goals i.e., 100. Therefore Finland, top of the rankings for the 2022 Index with a score of 86.51, is 86.51% of the way toward achieving all 17 SDGs. By contrast, bottom-ranked South Sudan scores 39.05, meaning it has a great distance to get from 39.05% progress toward achieving all the SDGs by 2030.
To illustrate, the SDG Index uses a traffic light system, with green indicating an achievement of the respective Goal, or otherwise being on track to achieve it by 2030. Red is the opposite, being far off course, with major challenges remaining. In between, yellow and orange are gradations of the middle light, orange suggesting further off course than yellow.
Using the example of the first indicator we’ll explore in SDG #1 (% of population living on less than $1.90/day), the bounds for each colour in the SDG Index for this indicator correspond to the below.
Paramount to the SDG Index is priority. This colour coding serves to illustrate chromatically where we’re at in our progress, to guide our prioritisation. The importance placed on countries scoring red or orange per indicator or Goal will be an overriding refrain throughout the book. If your country scored green on an indicator, you can put your feet up for that issue, and instead turn to those Goals or indicators for which your country has scored red.
The Global Goals are ambitious in breadth, intimidating at times to what we’re to do in what seems like a tiny frame of less than eight years at the time of writing. The purpose of the SDG Index is to show us which Goals and indicators need our immediate attention and energies, because the gap between where we need to be by 2030 and our present state is too far off course.
I’ll use my two countries of citizenship as an illustration. In the 2022 SDG Index, Australia scored red for:
SDG #2 (Zero Hunger)
SDG #12 (Responsible Consumption & Production)
SDG #13 (Climate Action)
SDG #15 (Life on Land)
Therefore, I focus on these Goals as a matter of prioritisation.
I hold dual citizenship with Malta, so incorporate it into my prioritised, red Goals. In the 2022 Index, Malta scored red for Goals #2, 6, 12 & 14, so I prioritise the extra Goals for which Malta has scored red i.e., Goals #6 and #14.
Some indicators are only for Organisation for Economic Coordination and Development (OECD) countries, which will be represented with an asterisk (*) next to the indicator heading. The OECD countries are often used to refer to the developed, high-income countries. Any further mention of ‘developed’ or ‘high-income’ countries will be synonymous with the high-income OECD members: US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Israel, most EU countries, Norway and Switzerland.
The reason why some indicators are OECD-only in the SDG Index is either because they're issues relevant only to high-income, developed countries, or only OECD countries have sufficient data for the indicator.
Many of the SDG Index indicators are appropriate at the national, state or city level, yet this book aims to adapt these indicators to the level of the individual. Implementing the SDGs in our personal lives means familiarising yourself with the underlying topics, and trying to coordinate your action toward implementing and monitoring these indicators.
Assigning individual responsibility is a stark request to place upon the shoulders of our fragile minds. We’re fortunate in the reality that the SDGs are tasks for the world. Yet for the tasks staked in this book, it must begin with you.