Foreign Policy
The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable
There are big problems with the United Nations’ most important
environmental metric.
BY JASON HICKEL | SEPTEMBER 30, 2020, 2:53 PM
In 2015, the world’s governments signed on to the U.N. Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) with a commitment to bring the global economy
back into balance with the living world. Now, five years later, as the
U.N. General Assembly convenes online to discuss the global ecological
crisis, everyone wants to know how countries are performing.
To answer this question, delegates and policymakers have referred to a
metric called the SDG Index, which was developed by Jeffrey Sachs “to
assess where each country stands with regard to achieving the
Sustainable Development Goals.” The metric tells a very clear story.
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, and Germany—along with most other rich
Western nations—rise to the top of the rankings, giving casual observers
the impression that these countries are real leaders in achieving
sustainable development.
There’s only one problem. Despite its name, the SDG Index has very
little to do with sustainable development all. In fact, oddly enough,
the countries with the highest scores on this index are some of the most
environmentally unsustainable countries in the world.
Take Sweden, for example. Sweden scores an impressive 84.7 on the index,
topping the pack. But ecologists have long pointed out that Sweden’s
“material footprint”—the quantity of natural resources that the country
consumes each year—is one of the biggest in the world, right up there
with the United States, at 32 metric tons per person. To put this in
perspective, the global average is about 12 tons per person, and the
sustainable level is about 7 tons per person. In other words, Sweden is
consuming nearly five times over the boundary.
There is nothing sustainable about this kind of consumption. If everyone
on the planet were to consume as Sweden does, global resource use would
exceed 230 billion tons of stuff per year. To get a sense for what this
would look like, consider all the resources that we presently extract,
produce, transport, and consume around the world each year—and all of
the ecological damage that this causes—and triple it.
Or take Finland, for example, which is No. 3 on the SDG Index. Finland’s
carbon footprint is about 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person
per year, similar to that of Saudi Arabia. This makes it one of the most
polluting countries in the world, in per capita terms, and a major
contributor to climate breakdown. For comparison, China’s carbon
footprint is about 7 tons per person. India’s is less than 2. If the
whole world were to consume as much fossil fuels as Finland does, the
planet would be literally uninhabitable.
This isn’t just a matter of a few odd results. Data published by
scientists at the University of Leeds shows that all of the top-ranked
countries in the SDG Index have significantly overshot their fair share
of planetary boundaries, in consumption-based terms—not only when it
comes to resource use and emissions but also in terms of land use and
chemical flows like nitrogen and phosphorous. It is physically
impossible for all nations to consume and pollute at the level of the
SDG top performers without destroying our planet’s biosphere.
In other words, the SDG Index is, from the perspective of ecology,
incoherent. It creates the illusion that rich countries have high levels
of sustainability when in fact they do not.
So what’s going on here? Well, the SDG Index is directly linked to the
Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 goals, each of which include
a number of targets. The SDG Index takes indicators for each of these
targets (where data is available), indexes them, and then averages them
together to arrive at a score for each goal. Then the 17 goals are
averaged together in turn to come up with the final figure. All of this
seems reasonable enough, on the face of it. But taking this approach
means introducing a number of analytical problems.
First, there is a weighting problem. The SDGs include three different
kinds of indicators: Some focus on ecological impact (like deforestation
and biodiversity loss), some focus on social development (like education
and hunger), and some focus on infrastructure development (like
transportation and electricity). Most of the SDGs contain a mix of
these, but the ecological indicators are almost always swamped, as it
were, by the development indicators. For example, the SDG Index has four
indicators for Goal 11 (on “sustainable cities and communities”); three
of them are development indicators, while only one of them has to do
with ecological impact. This means that if a country performs well on
the development indicators, its score for that goal will look good even
if it fails in terms of sustainability.
This issue is compounded by a second problem, namely, that only four of
the 17 SDGs deal mostly or wholly with ecological sustainability (Goals
12 through 15). The other 13 are mostly focused on development. Once
again, this means that good performance on the development goals
outweighs poor performance on the sustainability goals, so countries
like Sweden, Germany, and Finland can rise to the top of the index (with
the United States ranking in the top 20 percent) even though they have
highly unsustainable levels of ecological impact.
The final problem is that the vast majority of the ecological indicators
are territorial metrics that do not account for impacts related to
international trade. For instance, take the air pollution indicator in
Goal 11. Rich countries come out looking clean—but this is largely
because they have offshored most of their polluting industries to
countries in the global south since the 1980s, thus shifting the problem
abroad.
So too with the indicators on deforestation, overfishing, and so on:
most of this damage happens in poorer countries, but it is
disproportionately caused by overconsumption in richer countries, and
quite often perpetrated by corporations or investors headquartered
there. As a result, poorer countries get punished in the SDG Index for
being harmed and polluted by richer countries. Of course, in many cases
territorial metrics are appropriate; but there are a number of
indicators in the SDG Index that should be reckoned as well in
consumption-based terms and yet are not.
In effect, the SDG Index celebrates rich countries while turning a blind
eye to the damage they are causing. Ecological economists have long
warned against this approach. It violates the principle of “strong
sustainability,” which holds that good performance on development
indicators cannot legitimately substitute for destructive levels of
ecological impact. The SDG Index team are aware of this problem. It’s
even mentioned (briefly) in their methodological notes—but then it’s
swept under the rug in favor of a final metric that has little grounding
in ecological principles.
Ultimately, metrics of sustainable development need to be
universalizable. In other words, the top performers on the index should
represent a standard that all nations could aspire to achieve without
this leading to a collapse of global ecosystems. That’s not the case
with the SDG Index, where rich countries are held up as models when in
reality, as the Leeds research shows, they are a big part of the problem.
The United Nations needs to redesign the index to correct these issues.
This can be done by rendering the ecological indicators in
consumption-based terms wherever relevant and possible, to take account
of international trade, and by indexing the ecological indicators
separately from the development indicators so that we can see clearly
what’s happening on each front. This way we can celebrate what countries
like Denmark and Germany have achieved in terms of development while
also recognizing that they are major drivers of ecological breakdown and
need urgently to change course, with rapid reductions in emissions and
resource use.
Until then, we should avoid using the SDG Index as a metric of progress
in sustainable development, because it’s not. Given the stakes of the
crisis we face, we need to tell more honest, accurate stories about
what’s happening to our planet and who is responsible for it.
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts. Twitter: @jasonhickel
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