Open AccessPrincipal indicators to monitor sustainable development goals
Author(s) -
Chenyang Shuai,
Liping Yu,
Xi Chen,
Bu Zhao,
Shen Qu,
Jiang Zhu,
Jianguo Liu,
Stephen E. Miller,
Ming Xu
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/ac3697
Subject(s) - principal (computer security) , sustainable development , performance indicator , computer science , data collection , economic indicator , investment (military) , environmental resource management , business , environmental science , statistics , economics , mathematics , political science , computer security , marketing , politics , law , macroeconomics
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.