Selecting indicators for measuring progress towards sustainable development goals at the global, national and corporate levels

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) guide towards sustainability across a broad palette of aspects. Since their adoption by the United Nations in 2015, many organizations have started using them to relate their own sustainability performance. However, there exists no consensus nor science-based methods for performing such assessments, hence bringing the risk of cherry-picking and arbitrary target-setting among the 17 goals and potentially compromising the robustness, usefulness, and credibility of SDG assessment. To address this, we propose a framework that enables to systematically evaluate or select indicators for assessing and monitoring SDG performance at different scales. A critical review of sustainability indicator selection criteria was performed, forming the basis for recommendations of existing criteria. Two separate applications of the framework are operationalized, namely the evaluation of existing indicator sets and the selection of new indicators, respectively. The guide is tested and demonstrated on two different proof-of-concept cases representing the global level and the company level. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework allows decision-makers to systematically evaluate and select SDG indicators for different scopes, offering stronger scientifically founded indicator sets and reducing unintentional bias. Furthermore, the framework still provides the flexibility of tailoring indicators in the selection process, allowing the user to freely select the indicators to be tested. The framework and criteria are central inputs for the indicator selection phase and represent an essential step towards a full-fledged, consistent framework for SDG performance assessments.