Assessing global sustainability performance, imbalance, and coordination over space and time
Xu, Zhenci, Chen, Xiuzhi, Jiang, Qutu, Wu, Xutong, Bhattarai, Nishan, Mullen, John, Li, Zhongbin B., Gurney, Georgina G., Li, Shuxin, Li, Canbing, Yin, Tuo, Bian, Sumin, Zhang, Jian, Han, Siqi, Li, Yunkai, and Liu, Jianguo (2025) Assessing global sustainability performance, imbalance, and coordination over space and time. Nature Communications, 16 (1). 9186.
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Abstract
Adopted by 193 countries in 2015, the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to address urgent global challenges by 2030. However, consistent and comprehensive assessments of countries’ spatiotemporal performance, and of the balance and coordination among the SDGs, remain scarce. Here, we developed three indices—the Sustainable Development Relative Performance Index (SDRPI), Sustainable Development Gini Index (SDGI), and Sustainable Development Coordination Index (SDCI)—to measure global SDG performance, imbalances, and coordination over time and across space. Results show that most countries improved their sustainable development performance from 2000 to 2020, with imbalances narrowing and low-income countries achieving faster progress than high-income ones. Several Eastern European countries recorded the largest SDRPI gains, while Sweden, Spain, and Poland exhibited the lowest SDGI scores, reflecting minimal imbalances. Low-income countries also displayed strong coordination in SDG improvements. These findings underscore the urgency of targeted governance and policies to address underperforming SDG targets and foster balanced, coordinated global sustainable development.
| Item ID: | 89906 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
| Copyright Information: | ©The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Jul 2026 06:20 |
| FoR Codes: | 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410402 Environmental assessment and monitoring @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1899 Other environmental management > 189999 Other environmental management not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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