To monitor the progress made in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Jeffrey Sachs and his colleagues at the Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) developed the SDG Index and Dashboard. Although this tool is useful for analysing progression over time and implementation of sustainable development goals in different countries, the index does not sufficiently take into account the integrated nature of the 2030 Agenda due to the use of the arithmetic mean.
To overcome these difficulties, Researchers and Professors of the ARCO Scientific Committee propose to introduce the use of the Integrated Sustainable Development Index, or I-SDI. This new index takes more efficiently into account the trade-offs and synergies between objectives and targets present in the economic, social and environmental spheres of sustainable development.
This result was obtained by introducing a new aggregation method from the Multidimensional Synthesis of Indicators approach, also developed and proposed by ARCO Researchers in previous publications. Following this method it is possible to take into greater consideration the links between the objectives and to solve the problems associated with the use of the arithmetic or geometric mean.
In the proposal, presented in the article entitled Tracking the SDGs in an ‘integrated’ manner: A proposal fora new index to capture synerigies and trade-offs between and wthin goals, recently published on “World Development”, there is also a comparison between the results of the I-SDI and those generated by the SDG Index or the use of the geometric mean. Finally, to assess the heterogeneity present within the individual objectives, this article proposes to introduce another new index, I-SDI2, that uses the same MSI approach not only between objectives but also within them.
Conclusions show significant differences in scores and rankings, highlighting the need for a more flexible and integrated measure capable of guiding policy makers and monitoring overall progress.
