Progress towards achieving the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is “seriously off track,” the latest issue of the annual Sustainable Development Report warned. It noted that the world needed to “double down” on its efforts by radically overhauling international financial rules in order to get back on track. The report’s authors argued that $500 billion needed to be mobilized annually to fund policy integration, greater commitment by countries to multilateral integration, and sustainable development.
Released on June 21, 2023, by Dublin University Press, the report uses publicly available data published by institutions such as the World Bank and WHO as well as NGOs and research centers to compile statistics on each country’s progress toward achieving the Agenda 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted by UN member nations in 2015.
Fig.1. SDG Index world average: pre-pandemic trend and trend needed to achieve the SDGs by 2030
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2023
This year’s Sustainable Development Report noted that the incremental advancements which had been made to achieving the Agenda 2030 goals between 2015 to 2019 were completely derailed by the pandemic in 2020 and have since failed to regain coherent forward progress.
It also noted that only limited progress is currently being made on SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and SDG 15 (Life on Land), even in countries which share a large portion of responsibility for ongoing climate and biodiversity crises.
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2023 Click to Enlarge
Despite these drastic warnings, the authors of the 2023 Sustainable Development Report assert that none of the 2030 Agenda SDGs are “beyond our reach,” and what the world urgently needs to do now is “double down” on SDGs, primarily via new legislation at the UN to adopt and implement SDG stimulus measures that will attract vast new volumes (at least $500 billion annually) of financial investments via a “deep and overdue reform” of global financial architecture.
Facing strong headwinds
According to the 2023 Sustainable Development Report, global achievement of the SDGs rose from 64% in 2015 to 66% in 2019, but this figure has remained virtually unchanged since then. Furthermore, the gap in SDG outcomes between high-income nations and low-income nations is projected to widen to 29 points by 2030, in contrast to 2015 when the gap was 28 points. According to the authors of the report, this means that the world is at risk of losing a decade’s worth of progress towards global convergence, and they warn that not a single one of the 17 SDGs is now projected to be met by 2030.
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2023
Most significantly for the authors of the 2023 Sustainable Development Report is that virtually no progress has been made whatsoever on SDG 13 (Climate Action). According to the authors of the report, there is now a strong likelihood of global temperatures overshooting the 1.5° Celsius target established by the Paris Agreement. Furthermore, the authors warn that, even in a best-case scenario with the full adoption of current pledges, the planet will experience 1.8° Celsius of warming by 2100.
Other SDGs under serious risk of non-implementation include SDG 15 (Life on Land) as all dimensions of biodiversity are now under threat. Furthermore, the authors report that the current loss of species rate is between 1,000 and 10,000 times more than the “natural” extinction rate, citing global warming and pollution as the primary causes. Furthermore, the authors note that indigenous people, who are credited with having safeguarded natural resources for millenia, are themselves now facing greater threats than ever before.
Additional threats to achieving SDG 15 include water scarcity, with an estimated 1.8 billion people across the planet now consuming drinking water that has been contaminated by human waste. Furthermore, chemical discharges into the water supply from irrigation practices are also negatively affecting the quality of life on land.
Progress towards achieving SDG 14 (Life Below Water) is also facing severe headwinds as an estimated 90% of global fish stocks are now being over-exploited. Threats towards achieving SDG 14 are also coming from threats in the form of ocean trawling, the destruction of coastal wetlands, the pollution of estuaries with agricultural chemicals, the acidification of the ocean, plastic waste in the high seas, and “slowdowns” of some oceanic currents as the result of climate change.
The other key SDG facing serious problems with forward motion is SDG 4 (Education for All) as the authors of the 2023 Sustainable Development Report note that hundreds of millions of children around the world are currently either completely unschooled or are unable to achieve basic literacy and numeracy skills even after several years of (substandard) education.
SDGs status at the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda
The authors of the Sustainable Development Report estimate that only 18% of SDG targets are on track to be achieved worldwide by 2030, with success coming primarily from achievements in basic health outcomes such as reduced infant mortality and improved access to basic infrastructure and services, such as mobile phone usage, internet usage, and the number of adults with a bank account.
The five countries with the most number of SDG targets that have been achieved or are on track to be achieved by 2030 are: Denmark, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and Slovakia. The five countries that have the most number of SDG targets showing reversal in progress are: Myanmar, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, Yemen, and Lebanon.
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2023
In terms of the overall SDG Index score, the top 10 best-ranked countries are: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, France, Norway, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Estonia.
The ten worst-ranked countries are: Madagascar, Liberia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Niger, Somalia, Yemen, Chad, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan.
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2023
Overall, European countries top the SDG index rankings and are on track to achieving more SDG targets than any other region. Indeed, all of the top 20 countries on the SDG index are in Europe, but even so, not a single nation has a perfect score, illustrating the fact that even the highest-performing countries are still facing major challenging in achieving some SDGs, particularly related to climate, biodiversity, and sustainable diets.
Next steps
The authors of the 2023 Sustainable Development Report have drawn on their decade-long experience in monitoring SDG progress and a number of other related initiatives to formulate five major lessons which can serve as priorities to better inform SDG policies and obtaining the necessary financing to implement them:
- A suite of statistical tools are needed at all levels to both guide SDG action as well as improve accountability.
- More funding is needed to obtain better statistics.
- Investments (approximately $100 billion) need to be made in data and science literacy in order to strengthen the science-policy interface.
- Non-traditional statistics pathways can help address shortfalls in official statistics, which can then be leveraged to better inform investment decisions.
- Space-based technologies can help address data gaps and timelines as currently, lags in international data reporting for key SDG indicators can exceed two or even three years.
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2023
This improvement in data collecting and analysis, in conjunction with reforming global financial architecture, can thus be used to positively contribute toward better political leadership and institutional coordination for the SDGs, SDG integration into sectoral policies and pathways, and a stronger commitment to multilateralism under the UN charter in order to fully achieve the SDGs by or shortly after the year 2030.
Incomplete data
Although the authors of the 2023 Sustainable Development Report note that their annual reports have been generally well-received by the research and policy communities, they note that national governments often argue that the results reported in their report are biased due to missing data as well as significant lags in data reporting. The authors admit that their published results often represent the performance of previous governments in office and that there are significant time lags in collecting international statistics, but they blame this on chronic underfinancing of statistics in lower-income and lower-middle-income countries.
Although Dublin University Press, the publisher of the 2023 Sustainable Development Report, has no official relationship with the United Nations, the principal authors, which include Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Professor Christian Kroll, and Guillaume Lafortune, are highly respected scholars worldwide and have long-standing professional ties to the United Nations. The Sustainable Development Report was formerly known as the SDG Index and Dashboards.
