For the last few years, the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have provided a comprehensive yet complex framework on how to improve the lives of people in all levels of society. Three years after their launch, Social Progress Initiative CEO, Michael Green, agreed to give an overview of the global progress made towards these SDGs during our annual Stock Exchange Day, which was held in May.
Q: Your TED talks about the SDGs and global progress towards these goals have been viewed more than 2,000,000 times. How do you explain this interest?
A: The Sustainable Development Goals are an extraordinary promise about the future of our world that could represent billions of people having a better life quality by 2030, therefore we really need every government to implement these goals into their national planning processes. Some countries seem definitely on the right track to achieve them, but I am concerned that others have gotten used to the idea that UN targets were created exclusively for less developed countries. The SDGs are different. We should all get involved. The clock is ticking, the time to act is now.
Q: You have created the Social Progress Index. Could you tell us more about this initiative?
A: Along with several business partners including Deloitte and Michael Porter from Harvard Business School, we created the Social Index Progress a few years ago as a tool to measure the quality of life in society. One issue with the SDGs is that we don’t have all the information necessary to measure their progress, so we instead use 51 different indicators, with data on each country and aggregate them together with a rigorous methodology in order to determine a robust score that goes from 0 to 100. 0 represents the worst score possible – social progress of 0 - and 100 is the minimum standard needed to achieve the SDGs. This final number enables us to have a clear idea of which countries will achieve the SDGs by 2030 on current trends, but also to have a global perspective of the progress made.
Q: So the Social Progress Index can be used to measure progress towards the SDGs. How does it work in practice?
A: It does not look like the SDGs, but the characteristics we are studying are fundamentally the same. The Social Progress Index is based on three questions: Does everyone in your society have the basic means of survival (e.g. food, water, shelter, safety)? Does everyone in your society have the foundations of well-being (e.g. education, information, health and a good-quality environment)? Lastly, does everyone in your society have opportunities in the form of rights, freedom, inclusiveness and access to advanced education? Overall, it is a comprehensive package of data on the quality of life in society. However, it is not a sustainability measure; we are not looking at whether the goals can be achieved with the planet’s environmental limits. You will need other tools for that.
Q: How are we doing so far?
A: From a global point of view, we did not start at 0 but at 69.1 in 2015 and currently, we have made it to 70.5, which means that on the current trend, we will score 75.2 in 2030 and have to wait until 2094 to get to 100! That is a long way off our goal. If you look at the progress of the different countries more closely, you realise that their evolution are really uneven. Some big economies like Norway, Germany and Luxembourg will make it, but some others like Canada, France, the US or UK will not. It is disturbing because these make up some of the countries with the most resources and therefore should be the closest to the SDGs.
We can argue that these countries do not represent the majority of the world’s population, but if you look at those with more than 100 million inhabitants, the results are just as mixed with some countries like Mexico, Russia or China being pretty close to 100, and others like Ethiopia, Nigeria and Pakistan are a long way off.
Q: The future does not seem bright indeed. Is there any chance to reverse the current trend?
A: For that, we need to look further into the data to see where opportunities are and which negative trends could be reversed. I usually drill down into 3 aspects: Where we are doing quite well, where there could be a great opportunity and finally, where we will face a big challenge.
If you look at SDG 2 “Zero Hunger” and SDG 3 “Good Wealth and Well-being,” the results are encouraging. These are areas where the world made a lot of progress, partly thanks to the Millennium Development Goals, prior to the SDGs. If we project the current trends, we would score 94.5, which is pretty close to the 100 we are aiming for. Some countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia are making quick progress, and we know that there are great opportunities for slower countries like the Philippines.
On some other aspects like SDG 6 “Clean Water and Sanitation” and SDG 12 “Responsible Consumption and Production” - two fundamental needs - we can see that we have not done so well. Our starting point was lower, our progress in the last few years has been slower and we will finish a long way off. Again, we see some countries like China or Ethiopia making rapid progress from a low base, and we see others not progressing fast enough. The good news is that we have solutions to these problems; what we need now is to scale these solutions globally with financial and technical expertise. If we manage to focus our resources, SDGs 6 and 12 are two great opportunities for a quick win and a notable change.
Finally, if we look at what we call “personal rights and inclusiveness”, not only was our starting point lower, but we have even gone backwards. This aspect is a crosscutting theme across the SDGs because there is an idea of inclusiveness in many of these goals, such as SDG 1 “No Poverty”, SGE 5 “Gender Equality", SDG 11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities” and many others. Many countries do not make personal rights and inclusiveness a priority in their development process, which is a problem because these issues touch countries at all levels of development. We hope that this trend can be reversed quickly enough, but it is not a scaling issue this time; each country has to find concrete solutions.
Overall, I think it is important that we focus on all aspects of the SDGs instead of doubling down on the easiest ones and leaving the most complicated ones aside. The SDGs are a complex comprehensive programme for our world and we should not let go of them and let down their promise.
