Sustainable development from millennium 2015 to sustainable development goals 2030

In modern economies, the advancement of well‐being of the citizens should be in an inclusive and sustainable way. In this respect, the sustainable welfare targets should exclusively include three main pillars: economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection. These pillars consist of qualitative and nonmonetary, as well as monetary and quantitative indicators to monitor. Although sustainable development today is well‐appreciated in most governments' agenda, yet it is generally not a trivial task to measure its progress especially due to multidimensional nature of some targets. In this article, sustainable development is measured by using a wide range of indicators within multidimensional perspective of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 2015. Indicators cover wide spectrum of areas such as poverty reduction, health, education, gender equality, and environment. An index creation method is developed for measuring the level and the performance of countries' progress through achieving MDGs. The index score levels and the rankings of countries are compared with similar indexes developed by United Nations. Finally, countries are classified according to their achievements relative to other countries (which is measured by the index) versus their self‐achievement performances (in terms of improvement of the index over years) in a big matrix. Results demonstrate the importance of measuring country performances in both dimensions. Understanding the progress in MDGs can help settle on binding targets for achieving the country specific goals in economic and noneconomic areas and on the mechanisms to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030, which set amid on the success of MDGs.Post prin

Sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): From Moral Imperatives to Indicators and Indexes. A Methodology for Validating and Assessing SDGs

Sustainability is a multidimensional concept that is not directly measurable, so it requires a set of indicators in order to be assessed. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) program offers a detailed dashboard of sustainability indicators. However, the path from the value assumptions and policy (that underpin this program) to its statistical operationalization is not clear. In order to produce usable knowledge for policy, sustainability assessment needs to be redefined from a technical to a moral process that requires prior responses to normative questions. This chapter suggests a model for sustainable development based on a set of moral imperatives which further specify the popular three-pillar model of sustainability based on social, economic, and environmental dimensions. The aim of this study was thus threefold. Firstly, it aimed to clarify the conceptual framework that is the foundation of country-level sustainability. Secondly, it proposes a methodology for assessing the different moral dimensions of sustainability. Finally, it aimed to validate this framework and also to assess the state of art of each of the European Union (EU) Member States with regard to the SDGs. Operationally, using the latest available national cross-country data with multivariate statistical analysis, the study builds several composite indexes to assess the performance of European Member States on single imperatives, in order to identify priorities and gaps that must be addressed to achieve sustainability

Big data to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This paper discusses the importance of research design and indicators’ selection to facilitate the assessment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From this perspective, it feeds the discussion on the need of relevant indicators for monitoring SDGs. It provides a starting point of what can be done to strengthen the scientific underpinning of sustainability indicators. It leverages on findings of authors’ previous empirical studies on SDG indicators and composite indexes. These studies call for some shifts in the SGDs agenda in order to avoid the great risk to misallocate development investments. The first shift derives from the incompatibilities of some SGDs indicators. In particular, trade-offs occur across SDGs: progress on one the economic pillar cannot fully offset lack of progress on another (e.g. rising environmental degradation). This misalignment can be explained referring to the level of analysis of sustainability: part of the problem is that sustainability cannot be addressed solely at the national level as complex interactions among political and governmental levels in complex nested subsystems affect it. This implies a reframing of the SDG framework and a conceptualization of it at a local level to make it more locally relevant. Thus, the paper discusses the potential of big data (spatial information inherent in earth observational data, satellite data, mobile and social media data, etc.) to supplement traditional indicator