Towards Better Assessments of the Sustainable Development Goals: Advancing Methodologies for Comprehensive Evaluation and Implementation across Different Scales

In 2015, 193 member states of the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a collaborative blueprint to pursue sustainable development. Comprising 17 goals and 169 targets, they cover both societal and environmental aspects, serving as a shared aspiration for the world. Despite this commitment, our ecosystems are under increasing pressure, with researchers warning of the world's multifaceted crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorous use, and chemical pollution. The 2022 assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revealed record-high net greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade, resulting in substantial disruptions, hereunder droughts and extreme weather conditions, showing signs of destabilizing ecosystems. In parallel, many people still suffer from poverty, hunger, and lack of basic needs, underscoring the ongoing dual challenge of avoiding ecosystem collapse while ensuring safe and just lives for all.

This raises the question: Have the SDGs fallen short of their mission to effectively steer towards global sustainable development? To answer this, the research of the PhD project delves into the methods for assessing SDG progress, highlighting gaps in our ability to quantify and monitor the achievement of the goals. Key issues include the lack of absolute sustainability targets, the absence of consensus-based approaches for assessing the SDGs, and the inherent complexity of understanding and addressing interlinkages among the goals. This emphasizes the need for science-based support to help policymakers and practitioners at different levels to monitor progress effectively and identify strategies that contribute to the goals.

The objective of this PhD thesis is to explore and develop methods for assessing the SDGs at global, national, and organizational levels. The research addresses the above-mentioned challenges through the following research questions: (1) To what extent have companies integrated the SDGs into their reporting, and how does it align with their sustainability performances and progress? (2) What criteria currently guide the selection of indicators for SDG assessments, and how can a formalized approach be established to ensure a harmonized selection and application of SDG indicators at various scales? (3) What indicator sets can comprehensively and effectively evaluate progress towards individual SDGs at both national and sectoral levels? (4) How can SDG assessments incorporate the concept of absolute sustainability, and how can they address the complex interconnectedness of the goals?

Trends in company characteristics and frequency in SDG reporting were explored in Chapter 2, using an extensive dataset for 8,500 companies. The analysis showed that some SDGs were reported more often than others, with SDG 8, 13, 12, 3, and 5 being the most reported goals. The uneven focus raises concerns about the arbitrary selection of goals, potentially impeding progress on other goals where trade-offs may exist. Furthermore, the correlation between SDG reporting and corporate sustainability performance was investigated through regression analyses. The findings suggested that SDG reporting does not necessarily lead to improvements in sustainability performance, indicating a symbolic rather than transformative role of the goals. These findings underscore concerns about 'SDG-washing', when the goals are used for communication without efforts towards actual progress, calling for harmonized and consensus-based guidance on SDG indicator selection and assessments.

Building on prior calls for more science-based and informed guidance on SDG indicator selections, a structured framework was developed and is presented in Chapter 3. This framework enables systematic evaluation and selection of indicators for SDG performance assessment applicable across different scales. The core of this framework lies in a streamlined and comprehensive set of indicator selection criteria based on an extensive literature review. A systematic stepwise guide for applying the criteria was proposed for evaluating existing indicators (ex-post) and selecting new ones (ex-ante). Two illustrative test cases, at the global and company levels, respectively, were used to demonstrate the framework's ability to support practitioners in selecting more scientifically founded indicator sets. This offers a valuable starting point for systematic and consistent selection processes, contributing to a higher degree of comparability and reduced risk of biases. While the primary focus of this framework is on the indicator selection process, it further serves as a crucial element supporting full-sized SDG assessments.

The assessment of individual SDGs at national and sectoral scales was addressed in Chapter 4. Two novel approaches were proposed for choosing comprehensive indicator sets, focusing on SDG 7 ("affordable and clean energy") and SDG 2 ("zero hunger"), respectively. The former was concerned with monitoring purposes, while the latter was oriented toward the development of scenarios. Despite an emphasis on achieving sustainable energy, a critical literature review revealed incompleteness in existing indicators to capture SDG 7, particularly omitting environmental indicators. To address this gap, a novel and comprehensive set of SDG 7 indicators encompassing both socio-economic and environmental aspects was proposed. This novel set was applied to 176 countries, illustrating its use in policy support for fully achieving SDG 7. In contrast, a more holistic approach was taken for SDG 2 instead of strictly adhering to the goal and target definitions. Indicators were designed to capture the fundamental parts of the goal as bedrock for achieving sustainable diets to feed the world population. This covered a selected set of nutritional and environmental indicators. The two approaches (for SDG 7 and SDG 2) demonstrated the diverse uses of indicators in SDG assessments and highlighted the importance of the assessment scope and purpose.

Chapter 5 looks into the integration of absolute sustainability references in SDG assessments. Instead of only tracking relative progress, the absolute perspective aims to assess how far a certain activity is from achieving truly sustainable performance. This was tackled by defining and calculating absolute sustainability references for the two indicator sets defined for SDG 7 and SDG 2. These references relied on different concepts, hereunder the 'planetary boundaries' for environmental aspects and the concept of 'zero deprivation' for societal aspects. Different ethical sharing principles were applied to tailor the thresholds to the energy and food sector level, catering to the integration of absolute sustainability into the two approaches. In the first approach (with SDG 7), they served as benchmarks for monitoring national performances, revealing that all energy systems exceeded one or more of their thresholds or fell short of meeting societal needs. In the second approach (with SDG 2), an optimization model was introduced to identify diet scenarios meeting the goal. The absolute thresholds were directly integrated into the model as constraints, ensuring the diets fulfill these. The findings revealed possible dietary habits that can fulfill everyone with healthy and environmentally sustainable diets, calling for large shifts in current food landscapes. Such an approach offers valuable insight for policymakers in designing societal systems that are sustainable in an absolute sense, also moving beyond SDG 2.

A conceptual framework for assessing the interconnectedness within the SDG framework is presented in Chapter 6. The framework delves into the potential of using environmentally-extended multi-region input-output (EE-MRIO) models to link environmental and social indicators in a 'doughnut-economy'-like setup. The main focus lies in coupling social SDG indicators to the final demand in EE-MRIO, enabling the calculation of environmental impacts associated with social progress. This link hinges on the hypothesis of a relationship between the consumption of physical goods and the fulfillment of social human needs. Two mathematical model frameworks were proposed to define this integration of SDG indicators, and a set of required steps were outlined to enable the operationalization of the model framework. These included principles to prioritize 'essential' biophysical and physiological SDG indicators, considered foundational for achieving other societal goals. While establishing quantified relationships requires further efforts, once achieved, the framework can provide a valuable cornerstone for more systemic evaluations. This, in turn, can steer policymakers toward planning that integrates interlinkages between essential dimensions among the SDGs.

Altogether, the PhD thesis contributes to advancing methodologies for SDG assessment and implementation at various scales. It is believed to deliver valuable contributions to the field by proposing innovative assessment methods and addressing current challenges. These contributions aim to improve the robustness of the SDG framework, accelerate its implementation, and reduce the risk of SDG-washing.