Towards the 2030 Agenda: Measuring the Progress of the European Union Countries through the SDGs Achievement Index

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The success or failure in their implementation largely depends on the national implementation effort, measured within wide and compound indicator frameworks. Due to such complexity, providing a simple but comprehensive view on the progress to achieve the SDGs is a priority. Moreover, the measure of the progress allows the consistency among the different dimensions of sustainable development to be assessed. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the results accomplished by European Union Countries in achieving SDGs. In particular, the paper proposed the SDGs achievement index (SDG-AI), a multicriteria-based index, including six different dimensions and applied to EU countries. The SDG-AI allows the differences across the EU countries to be highlighted, and also assesses the contribution of the different dimensions to the final result. The use of such an index will also be useful to understand the effect of the pandemic on the development.