Making the Sustainable Development Goals Consistent with Sustainability

Abstract

The UN’s Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) are the most significant global effort so far to advance global sustainable development. Bertelsmann Stiftung and the sustainable development solutions network released an SDG index to assess countries’ average performance on SDGs. Ranking high on the SDG index strongly correlates with high per person demand on nature (or “Footprints”), and low ranking with low Footprints, making evident that the SDGs as expressed today vastly underperform on sustainability. Such underperformance is anti-poor because lowest-income people exposed to resource insecurity will lack the financial means to shield themselves from the consequences. Given the significance of the SDGs for guiding development, rigorous accounting is essential for making them consistent with the goals of sustainable development: thriving within the means of planet Earth.

Full text

July 2017 | Volume 5 | Article 181
PERSPECTIVE
published: 11 July 2017
doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2017.00018
Frontiers in Energy Research | www.frontiersin.org
Edited by:
Federico Maria Pulselli,
University of Siena, Italy
Reviewed by:
Fabrizio Saladini,
University of Siena, Italy
Siamak Sam Loni,
Monash Sustainable Development
Institute (MSDI), Australia
*Correspondence:
Mathis Wackernagel
mathis.wackernagel@
footprintnetwork.org
One Sentence Summary:
Bertelsmann and SDSN’s SDG
index reveals that the sustainable
development goals are largely
development goals, vastly
underperforming on sustainability.
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Energy Systems and Policy,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Energy Research
Received: 26April2017
Accepted: 21June2017
Published: 11July2017
Citation:
WackernagelM, HanscomL and
LinD (2017) Making the Sustainable
Development Goals Consistent
withSustainability.
Front. Energy Res. 5:18.
doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2017.00018
Making the Sustainable Development
Goals Consistent with Sustainability
Mathis Wackernagel*, Laurel Hanscom and David Lin
Global Footprint Network, Oakland, CA, United States
The UN’s Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) are the most signicant global effort so
far to advance global sustainable development. Bertelsmann Stiftung and the sustainable
development solutions network released an SDG index to assess countries’ average perfor-
mance on SDGs. Ranking high on the SDG index strongly correlates with high per person
demand on nature (or “Footprints”), and low ranking with low Footprints, making evident that
the SDGs as expressed today vastly underperform on sustainability. Such underperformance
is anti-poor because lowest-income people exposed to resource insecurity will lack the
nancial means to shield themselves from the consequences. Given the signicance of the
SDGs for guiding development, rigorous accounting is essential for making them consistent
with the goals of sustainable development: thriving within the means of planet Earth.
Keywords: sustainable development goals, SDG index, Ecological Footprint, biocapacity, sustainability, resource
accounting, resource security, poverty eradication
INTRODUCTION: SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
(SDGs) AND THEIR CONTEXT
Sustainable development has nally become the North Star for the international community. While
introduced only 30years ago to the UN through the “Brundtland commission” (World Commission
on Environment and Development, 1987), it has now moved center stage: it is referenced on the
UN’s home page,1 and it has its dedicated website.2 is extraordinarily positive public endorsement
reects the world’s ocial commitment to everyone’s wellbeing (development), while recognizing the
need to operate within the planet’s ecological limits (sustainable). is is the essence of any serious
sustainable development denition, including WWF, IUCN, and UNEP’s “improving the quality of
human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems” [WWF (World Wide
Fund for Nature), IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), and UNEP (United
Nations Environment Programme), 1991] or the Brundtland commission’s “sustainable develop-
ment is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development,
1987). While the latter does not explicitly reference biophysical constraints or resource security (the
inverse of biophysical constraints), it does so implicitly: a depleted planet will not be able to provide
the necessary physical inputs for future generations.
e fact that the world’s regenerative capacity is overstretched is hardly disputed, nor that natu-
ral capital is becoming a limiting factor for current and future human activities. e Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and research backing the planetary boundaries initiative (UNFCCC,
1 http://un.org.
2 http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org.

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2015; Huntingford and Mercado, 2016) document severe ecological
overuse, including rapid biodiversity loss, excessive nitrica-
tion, and climate change. e limitations imposed by the latter
has gained more prominence through the 2015 Paris Climate
Agreement’s target to not exceed 2°C warming over pre-industrial
temperatures (ideally no more than 1.5°C) (UNFCCC, 2015). Yet
current concentrations of 409ppm CO2 in the atmosphere may
already commit humanity to 1.5°C warming (Huntingford and
Mercado, 2016). If indeed 450ppm CO2e is the upper limit for
giving humanity a high probability of staying below 2°C (IPCC,
2014), and current emissions lead to an annual 2–3ppm increase
in the atmospheric CO2 concentration (assuming, for simplicity’s
sake, that non-CO2 greenhouse gases can be neglected, while in
reality they add signicant warming pressure), then humanity has
far less than 20years of current CO2 emissions le for the next
millenium and beyond (far less than 700Gt CO2e), whether from
fossil fuel use, cement production, GHG emitting agricultural
practices, or land-use change (Rockström etal., 2017).
Also, humanity’s current overall overuse of the planet’s eco-
systems can be quantied. One comprehensive metric adds up
all of humanity’s competing demands for biologically productive
space: area for crops, sh, livestock, ber, timber, the sequestra-
tion of excessive CO2 from fossil fuels, and productive areas used
for cities and roads. In essence, this approach is straight forward,
adding up all non-overlapping area uses needed to regenerate
what people demand. e sum total of this area is humanity’s
Ecological Footprint (Wackernagel etal., 2014). e latest, most
likely conservative, estimates indicate that humanity’s demand
exceeds the available capacity by over 68% (Borucke etal., 2013;
Global Footprint Network, 2017). Such overuse occurs because
people can emit more CO2 than the land and the oceans sequester,
trees can be cut more quickly than they regrow, and sh can
be harvested faster than they restock. As the ows of natural
capital demanded by human activities exceed what natural capital
regenerates over the same time period, this metric reveals stock
depletion leading to environmental degradation. Environmental
degradation means that these ecosystems ability to regenerate is
reduced. For some time, this gap between human demand and
regeneration can be bridged by the draw-down of natural capital,
such as through forest, groundwater, soil or sh sock depletion,
or by building-up of waste sinks such as CO2 accumulation in the
atmosphere. But the draw-down cannot last, as explained in the
carbon emission example above, which represents a signicant
portion of current global overuse.
Given the call for sustainable development and the clearly
documented physical constraints, the question becomes whether
according eorts are successful in achieving the overarching goal
of wellbeing for all, within the means of nature.
e most signicant global eort to comprehensively address
sustainable development are the UN’s SDGs (United Nations,
2015) launched in September 2015. ey are unprecedented and
unique, and we profoundly laud the UN for having been able to
successfully orchestrate their coming into being. Developed by
UN member nations, and adopted by 190 countries, these 17
goals and their 169 targets identify global development priorities,
eectively dening sustainable development through the selected
targets.
ose targets provide measurable benchmarks that in return
allow observers to test progress against each target (United
Nations, 2015). For any village, city, region, or country, it there-
fore becomes straightforward to assess how fully a country has
met each goal.
MEASURING THE SDGs: THE SDG INDEX
Researchers, supported by two non-for-prot organizations,
the Bertelsmann Stiung and the sustainable development
solutions network, used the 17 goals to construct an overarch-
ing measure of countries’ SDG performance—the SDG index.
is is the only index we have found that aggregates the overall
SDG performance—while other publications exist that provide
measures on the various aspects, such as the World Bank’s SDG
Atl as (World Bank, 2017) or the SDG indicators of the UN’s IAEG
(World Bank, 2017), Given the SDG targets, the research team
identied available indicators to approximate the performance
for each goal and then aggregated the performance across the
17 goals, giving them equal weight. In July 2016, they presented
their initial results that quantify and rank the SDG achievements
of all countries through their SDG index (Sachs etal., 2016). is
independently produced index scores each country’s achieve-
ments regarding each of to the 17 goals, using readily available
international indicators.
While there is no internationally comparable data for all 169
targets, the SDG index evaluates each goal with one to seven
indicators that provide global coverage. While limited and not
perfect, as the SDG index researchers proactively concede, they
represent, as explained below, a reasonable attempt to quantify
each country’s performance on the SDGs.
An index has two dimensions: how each component is evalu-
ated and how then the components are aggregated or weighed.
e SDG index weighs all goals equally, which is an adequate
reection of the SDGs, since they do not suggest any hierarchy or
preferences between the goals. Also, the SDG index’s choices to
quantify performance of each of the goals seems reasonable, pos-
sibly with the exception of goal 11 and goal 12, which could and
probably should have more focus on aspects central to resource
sec u r ity.
Indicators within the SDG index can be split into three
categories: (1) those that decrease people’s resource dependence
(e.g., activities that boost the availability of water, crops, or
zero-carbon energy), (2) those that increase people’s resource
dependence. ese are activities that require additional resource
consumption in order to work (e.g., activities that provide human
benets but need to be powered by resources in order to function
such as expanding hospitals or schools), and (3) those that neither
increase or decrease resource dependence. ese are activities that
merely organize society dierently but neither protect resources
nor demand more of them (e.g., securing equal rights for women
or increasing transparency of decision-making).
A rough analysis shows that in the current index, the rst
category makes up 13.6% of the weight of the index, the second
one 67.6%, and the third one 18.8%. In other words, resource
demanding aspects (category 2) outpace resource securing aspects
(category 1) ve to one. For instance, goal 13—climate action is

TABLE 1 | Our analysis of the sustainable development goal (SDG) index’s sensitivity to the resource security (or sustainability) dimension of the metric.
Resource relevant goals Weight of resource security in overall SDG index (each goal representing one seventeenth of total, or 5.9%)
6—clean water and sanitation 1 out of 3 indicators: freshwater withdrawal as % of total renewable water resources 1/3×5.9%=2.0%
The other two depend on resource use
7—affordable clean energy 1.5 out of 4 indicators: carbon intensity of electricity (counted half, because it does not reect
absolute use, and only covers electricity); share of renewable energy in total nal energy consumption (%)
1.5/4×5.9%=2.2%
The other two depend on resource use
11—sustainable cities and
communities
None out of the three indicators covers resource security issues. One measure captures housing
amount per person, the other two are sanitation focused (air pollution and water delivery)
0/3×5.9%=0%
12—responsible consumption
and production
0 out of 2 indicators covers resource security issues 0/2×5.9%=0%
13—climate action 1 out of two indicators: CO2 emissions from energy per person 1/2×5.9%=2.9%
The other indicator (climate change vulnerability) is not resource based, or rather the opposite.
Economically strong countries have more opportunities to protect themselves from climate impacts
14—life below water 3 out of 5 indicators: sheries health, marine protection, and % of sh stock overexploited or collapsed 3/5×5.9%=3.5%
15—life on land 1 out of 2 indicators: terrestrial sites protected 1/2×5.9%=2.9%
Total weight of resource security oriented indicators in SDG index 13.6%
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measured through two lenses: carbon emissions per person and
vulnerability to climate change. Carbon emissions correlates
with income (a category 1 indicator), vulnerability negatively
correlates with income since more auent societies have more
opportunities to reduce their infrastructure’s exposure to climate
calamities (a category 2 indicator). As a result, the two measures
largely neutralize each other in the index. Tab l e 1 summarizes the
indicators relevant to resource security (category 1).
If the index was more sensitive to resource security for goals
11 and 12 (as it probably should), resource security relevant
indicators (category 1) would represent 19.5% of the weight. is
assumes that at least half of the indicators for goals 11 and 12
would be measuring resource security, adding 5.9% to the 13.6%
(=19.5%). is improvement in the index would reduce the weight
of the resource demanding indicators to 61.7% (category 2).
is reweighing would slightly improve the ratio between the two
categories from 5 to 1 and 3.2 to 1 and most likely not change the
argument presented below.
EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE
OF THE SDGs ON SUSTAINABILITY
To evaluate the consistency of the SDGs with sustainable develop-
ment outcome, countries’ rankings on the SDG index are marked
in a diagram (Figure1) that plots countries according to their
development achievements (using the UN’s human development
index) on the horizontal and their resource use (using Global
Footprint Network’s Ecological Footprint) on the vertical. By
identifying nations’ position according to their development sta-
tus and resource demand, countries’ situation can be compared
to the necessary conditions for global sustainable development.
ese conditions, marked as the global sustainable development
quadrant, are an HDI over 0.7 for “high” (or 0.8 for “very high”)
development, and less than what is available globally to make
the Footprint replicable globally. is threshold could be 1.7
global hectares because this is the amount of biocapacity avail-
able per person in the world (Wackernagel etal., 2002; Global
Footprint Network, 2017). It amounts to all the biologically
productive land and sea areas divided by the number of peo-
ple on the planet. A global hectare, used for both measuring
Footprints and biocapacity, are biologically productive hectares
with world average productivity. e threshold for the Footprint
would need to be even lower in order to also support wild spe-
cies, for instance 0.85 global hectares per person if we followed
E.O. Wilson’s suggestion of leaving half the biocapacity wild
(Wilson, 2016).
e diagram in Figure1 reveals that the top 10 countries of
the SDG index are far distant from the global sustainable devel-
opment quadrant in the bottom right; the bottom 10 countries
have a low Footprint and low HDI. To put it in statistical terms, if
SDG achievement was uncorrelated with each country’s level of
resource demand, the likelihood of 19 out of the top 20 ranking
countries in the SDG index having a Footprint of over 5gha per
person would be less than 1/5,000th of a billionth. (e under-
5-gha-Footprint exception among the top 20 countries is the UK
with a Footprint of 4.9gha per person. Also note that the UK,
according to the 2017 National Footprint Accounts edition, had
a Footprint of 5.1gha per person in 2013.) e probability of 19
out of 20 being high Footprint countries can be assessed with the
following calculation: Given that 36 countries out of the 149 have
a Footprint of 5gha per person or larger, the likelihood of picking
19 out of 20 times a high Footprint country, if picked randomly,
would be approximately 36!/16!×129!/149!×21=1/5,000th of
a billionth. is is based on the assumption that the probability
for the correct rst pick is 36/149, for the second 35/148, for the
third 34/147, etc. Also, since one pick can be wrong among the 20
draws, this increases the probability nearly 21 fold.
In other words, the link between high Footprints and high
SDG index ranks is unlikely a coincidence. Also note that the
Ecological Footprint of the index’s top 20 ranking countries is
so large that if all other countries consumed at the same rate, it
would take the ecological capacity of over three planet Earths to
materially support all of humanity. is level of demand on the
planet is clearly not sustainable.

FIGURE 1 | Ecological Footprint per person and HDI by country indicate how close each country is to basic global sustainable development criteria (high human
development, within resource requirements that are globally replicable). Each number indicates the country’s ranking on the sustainable development goal (SDG)
index (only top and bottom 10 are marked here).
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Given the world’s current focus on carbon, one could
make the same analysis based on carbon only. It would be
less comprehensive because human economies demand
far more from the planet than just carbon sequestration.
However, the weakness of the SDGs to adequately address
the resource dimension would reveal itself even starker as
higher Footprint economies have also higher carbon portions
of their Footprint (United Nations, 2015). In other words, the
analysis of carbon only would show an even stronger negative
correlation between high performance on SDG index and
low-carbon economies.
CONCLUSION: SDGs MUST STRENGTHEN
THEIR SUSTAINABILITY SIDE
is SDG index, in spite of its potential limitations, makes it
possible to reveal a paradox humanity still needs to overcome:
as shown in Figure1, the SDG index rankings mimics the con-
ventional development pattern that links higher development
achievements with higher Footprints, rather than approaching
the global sustainable development quadrant. is conventional
development pattern is exactly what sustainable development
endeavors to rectify.
e SDG index may still not be a fully mature representation
of the UN’s SDGs. e authors of the index acknowledge in
their own report some of the index’s limitations. But even a more
complete SDG index will unlikely change the conclusions: the
weight the SDGs give to development consideration, and the
weak representation of the resource security aspect among
the goals and targets will not signicantly shi the results even
of a more complete and carefully constructed SDG index. is
near exclusion of resource security aspects (AtKisson Group,
2016) makes the current SDGs fall short of actively advancing
human wellbeing without further depleting the very natural
capital on which development depends. In 2013, Dave Griggs
from Monash University forewarned about the potential of
the then emerging SDGs not to address adequately the need of
“safeguarding Earth’s life-support system, on which the welfare
of current and future generations depends” (Griggs, 2013).
e SDGs would be far more eective, if they were structured
along the ultimate ends to ultimate means pyramid, recognizing
the dependence of social outcomes on resource conditions (Pinter
etal., 2014). As a growing population and climate change increase
pressure on natural resources, decreasing overall resource
demand is crucial for being able to continue to fuel development
achievements. Furthermore, higher demands of some countries

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Frontiers in Energy Research | www.frontiersin.org July 2017 | Volume 5 | Article 18
reduce opportunities of others to access the necessary resources,
exacerbating equity challenges.
Ignoring physical constraints imposed by planetary limits is
anti-poor because with fewer resources to go around, the lowest-
income people will lack the nancial means to shield themselves
from resource constraints, whether it is food-price shocks, weather
calamities, or energy and water shortages. All the legitimate and
important development gains the SDGs seek to achieve will fall
tragically short without the natural capital to power the economy
of each nation, region, city, or village. If we want to have a future,
SDGs need to robustly embrace the reality of resource constraints
and climate change. Also, we need robust accounting tools that
track the outcomes. Without such rigorous metrics, there is great
risk to misallocate development investments.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
MW draed the rst version. LH co-conceived the way how
to compare the SDG index ranking with the HDI-Footprint
approach. All three authors completed the manuscript. DL led
the update and improvements of the National Footprint Accounts
(2016 edition and 2017 edition).
FUNDING
is work, including the maintenance of the National Footprint
Accounts, was supported by the Barr Foundation and the MAVA
Foundation. e researchers of this study have no competing
nancial interests.
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Conict of Interest Statement: e authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or nancial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conict of interest.
e reviewer, FS, and handling editor declared their shared aliation, and the
handling editor states that the process nevertheless met the standards of a fair and
objective review.
Copyright © 2017 Wackernagel, Hanscom and Lin. is is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
e use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
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