Principal indicators to monitor sustainable development goals

Chenyang Shuai, Long Yu, Xi Chen, Bu Zhao, Shen Qu, Ji Zhu, Jianguo Liu, Shelie A. Miller, Ming Xu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Hundreds of indicators are available to monitor progress of countries and regions towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the sheer number of indicators poses unprecedented challenges for data collection and compilation. Here we identify a subset of SDG indicators (principal indicators) that are relatively easy to collect data for and also are representative for all the indicators by considering the complex interrelationship among them. We find 147 principal indicators that can represent at least 90% of the annual variances of 351 SDG indicators in the past (2000-2017) and are expected to do so for the future (2018-2030) with the lowest difficulty of data collection. Our results can guide future investment in building the data infrastructure for SDG monitoring to give priorities to these principal indicators for global comparison.

Original languageEnglish
Article number124015
JournalEnvironmental Research Letters
Volume16
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • dimension reduction
  • principal indicators
  • sustainable development goals

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