A recent opinion piece by Jason Hickel in Foreign Policy criticizes the SDG Index and Dashboards that assess progress on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, published annually by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Bertelsmann Stiftung in the Sustainable Development Report. As co-authors of the annual report, we feel compelled to respond to these critiques.
Hickel is correct that good measures are needed to evaluate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and that the official SDG indicator framework, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in July 2017 and revised regularly, has important limitations, especially for tracking environmental and biodiversity goals.
