J.Sachs, G.Schmidt‐Traub, C.Kroll, G.Lafortune, G.Fuller, F.WoelmThe Sustainable Development Goals and COVID‐19. Sustainable Development Report 2020Cambridge University Press, 2020. 510 p.

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 2015 to “end poverty and set the world on a path of peace prosperity and opportunity for all on a healthy planet” by 2030. This ambitious framework includes 17 goals (e.g., no poverty, zero hunger, good health, quality education, etc.) with 169 targets and 231 unique indicators. The SDGs have been widely adopted to guide policy makers in development efforts around the world, but they also have been criticized as too unwieldy and all-encompassing. The Economist (March 26, 2015) concluded that the “SDGs are unfeasibly expensive” and “are so sprawling and misconceived that the entire enterprise is being set up to fail.” Nevertheless, the SDGs are now an integral part of the global development movement and are often cited by advocates of specific interventions. The Sustainable Development Report 2020 (SDR2020) was prepared by teams of independent experts at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Bertelsmann Stiftung. It is separate from the The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020 published by the UN. The project is directed by Jeffry Sachs, who was an advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban-Ki Moon in the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and SDGs. As in previous years, the SDR2020 presents and aggregates data from all UN member states to describe each country's progress towards achieving the SDGs and indicates areas requiring faster progress. Estimates of indicators rely on the most up-to-date data from variety of official and nonofficial sources. In order to summarize levels and trends in country performance, the report calculates indices for each SDG with a scale from 0 to 100 (worst to best). A country's overall SDG Index score and its scores on individual SDGs can be interpreted as a percentage of optimal performance. The overall SDG index score ranges from a high of 84.7 in Sweden to a low of 38.5 in Central African Republic. The report's central chapter summarizes global and regional trends in index scores, and appendix tables present two-page summaries of levels and trends for SDG indicators for each country. Besides struggling with a range of methodological issues, the authors faced the difficult task of succinctly summarizing a very large set of data (115 SDGs indicators for 193 countries). Unfortunately, there are few general findings, because the degree of progress towards achieving the SDGs depends on (i) country/region, (ii) the specific SDG, and (iii) level or trend. On average, progress since 2015 has been fastest in low- and middle-income countries especially in East and South Asia. Africa scores low but showed significant improvements in a number of SDGs. OECD countries, which have on average the highest scores, made only limited progress. The report provides a valuable but rather brief summary of these regional differences. A second objective of SDR2020 is to review policy efforts to implement the SDGs. This assessment is based on information gathered in new expert and public opinion surveys to gauge political leadership in support of the SDGs at the country level. Results confirm that the SDGs framework is increasingly used at many national and international statistical institutes and other data providers. The adoption of the SDG framework by policy makers is growing but more limited. The report's clear exposition in graphs and tables and the many country and regional statistics will no doubt be appreciated by policy makers and researchers in national and international organizations. However, the value of the findings is somewhat limited by the lack of current data for many indicators. As the authors discovered, most estimates are not up to date and a substantial proportion of the data points available now even have a year of reference that predates the adoption of the SDGs. This diminishes the value of publishing country-level estimates on an annual basis, as indicators for many countries change little from one year to the next. The report was in preparation when the Covid-19 epidemic struck. A brief discussion of this huge new human and economic crisis is included, and the authors identify which SDGs will likely be most heavily affected. The epidemic will cause massive disruption of progress on the SDGs for years to come, but it was too early to assess this damage at the time of the publication of the report (July 2020).