The Sustainable Development Goals require standards, not silver bullets

The United Nations should urgently open-source the standards it has created, and the data it collects, in order to achieve planetary coordination to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Cameron Burgess

and

Dr. Astrid J. Scholz

Sep 13, 2023

Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda could become an epitaph for a world that might have been.1

As an organising framework for describing various elements of the polycrisis, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs for short, are the most universally understood. Coming into the 2023 session of the United Nations General Assembly next week in New York, and despite the significant effort and investment being made towards their resolution, we are failing to make sufficient progress.

According to the UN’s most recent report on the SDGs:

“It's time to sound the alarm. At the mid-way point on our way to 2030, the SDGs are in deep trouble. A preliminary assessment of the roughly 140 targets with data show only about 12% are on track; close to half, though showing progress, are moderately or severely off track and some 30% have either seen no movement or regressed below the 2015 baseline.”2

We need reliable data in order to make effective decisions at planetary scale. And yet, more than half of the data used to measure progress is significantly out of date, and in some cases worryingly absent.

Perhaps nowhere is this more self-evident than in the case of SDG13, “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. With the current cluster of climate change fueled severe fires, floods, and hurricanes starkly illustrating the urgency to take immediate, massive action to avert devastating climate impacts upon societies across the globe, the lack of reliable and timely SDG13 data (“only around 21% of countries have data for SDG13”)3 should be at the top of the agenda for SDG Summit 2023 and Climate Week 2023.

Further, the absence of reliable, universal information about organisations and projects addressing any of the SDGs, makes it clear that we lack collective access to essential data that would inform better quality, faster, and more coordinated action.

At any scale.

A careful read of The Sustainable Development Goals report 2023: Special Edition—Towards a Rescue Plan for People and Planet makes several things abundantly clear:

While we have significantly more data than in 2015, and significantly better ways to collect and analyse them, the quality of much of that data is questionable
Earmarking investment into building the capacity and interoperability of national statistical bodies is a critical requirement for achieving coordination across public institutions everywhere
The limited interoperability of UN data sets, and the opaqueness of the standards agreed to by the UN for SDG data, means that people, knowledge and capital cannot be coordinated at any meaningful scale
Limited data aggregation at a sub-national level is a direct consequence of failing to engage the vast number of NGOs (of all legal forms) addressing the SDGs:

Source: UN DESA. 2023. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023: Special Edition - July 2023. New York, USA: UN DESA. © UN DESA. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/; p. 10

“Access to timely and high-quality disaggregated data is essential. It can multiply the efficiency and effectiveness of domestic and development spending, generating a data dividend for implementation of the Goals.”4

The United Nations is not a perfect institution, but it is the only truly global institution with the motivation to address the SDGs, given that it is a representative body for almost every human alive today—regardless of whether or not they agree with the data. The problem with insufficient or unreliable data, however, is that it leaves room for interpretation.

And even a cursory look at this graph makes clear that there are significant chunks of “insufficient data”, making it difficult to either target our interventions, or verify their effectiveness.

Put simply, without reliable and contemporaneous data to inform our actions, we will continue to make systemic interventions in the dark, informed by educated guesses about what’s required for each. It’s like playing darts with a blindfold on —we know the direction of the board, and can fumble in the box for our darts, but there’s no guarantee how often we’re going to hit the target, or with what. And this is happening hundreds of millions of times a minute, all across the planet, as individuals, organisations and communities make the best decisions they can based upon the information at their disposal.

As we’ve articulated previously, global systems requires global standards in order to function coherently. Transportation, telecommunications, finance—these systems only function through a dizzying variety of interrelated, interoperable, internationally agreed upon standards. What we think of as the internet is itself a collection of standards, the first of which, the TCP/IP protocol suite, celebrates its 50th anniversary next year. This serves as a timely reminder of the powerful role that communication standards play in ensuring the fast, decentralized, reliable, and safe transmission of information across the hardware and software components of the modern internet, which in turn has become the basis for vast value creation, not least by fostering effective collaboration on shard interests, challenges and opportunities across geographic and cultural distance.

Sadly, funding for systemic digital infrastructures to support addressing the varying interrelated aspects of the SDGs is frequently pointed towards novel and unproven technologies (lately in Web3 and AI). But where we really need a systemic intervention is at the level of data—establishing internationally agreed, and universally accessible standards for how we collect, store, curate, compute and control the raw data, eradicating the data graves of unnecessarily closed systems, and permitting massive defragmentation of the petabytes of information stored in hundreds of millions of disparate databases.

Granted, artificial intelligence has the potential to create exponential leaps in our problem solving capacity, but an AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. Neither a human nor artificial intelligence can learn from data it cannot see.

Greater use of new data sources and innovative approaches—including geospatial information, remote sensing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, crowd sourcing, qualitative methods, citizen-generated data and private sector data—represent new opportunities, although they are not without their own risks and challenges.5

You may note that while we recognise that the United Nations is the only international organisation with the motivation to address the SDGs, it’s lacking in both the mandate and the money to do so.

The first of these, the mandate, is only meaningful at national and sub-national scales. As a body intended to provide representative governance, the UN is bound to expressing the opinions and agreements of its members. Ultimately, the UN has little power to enforce the agreements of its member states, which is why the mandate for these activities can only meaningfully exist further down the chain. National and sub-national bodies, especially local governments, have the greatest capacity to engage with smaller scale stakeholders.

“Localization, anchored on the principle of multilevel governance and multistakeholder collaboration, is a key approach to collectively propel us towards greater inclusion and sustainability. Local and regional governments have a key role to play in this process since 65 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goals targets are linked to their work and mandates. As the sphere of government closest to local communities, they are essential for responding to the erosion of the social contract and for protecting our societies amid intersecting global crises.”6

And when it comes to money, let’s be honest. There is no single institution, nor collection of institutions, with access to the $176 trillion in liquid capital required to address the SDGs: even the Global Investors for Sustainable Development (GISD) Alliance tops out at a total market cap of only $16 trillion!

And even if the UN had all three—the motivation, the money, and the mandate to address the SDGs, none of that matters without appropriate incentives and mechanisms to kick-start and sustain the vast coordination essential for tackling planetary challenges.

But how do we coordinate the capacities and resources of the millions of organisations addressing the SDGs if we lack common languages to describe the nature of their projects and solutions, and to document them in such a way that we can more easily adopt and adapt them to new contexts? How do we accelerate the funding of individual and multilateral projects, without a common method for defining the key information all funders seek in order to avail them of the particular flavours of impact finance they require?

If the Goals are to become “a guiding star that shapes national policies, budgets, institutions and long-term national development planning”,7 they must become a framework to which we can all contribute, and upon which we all can build.

As heads of state convene in New York next week for the UN General Assembly and the SDG Summit, it would be refreshing to the other 8+ billion people their discussions implicate if they gave more attention to the underlying infrastructural work necessary to to enable global coordination, than to the variety of non-binding resolutions world leaders have got comfortable with making.

To those labouring inside of the extraordinary machine that is the United Nations, who continue to believe in the UN’s power to advance the Goals in service to all of humanity, let’s talk. There are countless organisations like ours labouring in the space between institutions, who believe that “Breaking through to a better future for all” is only possible by taking a mutualistic approach, and removing all barriers to cross-organisational coordination—starting with the flow of data.

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