How do we know if a country is improving or going backwards?
Monitoring the SDGs means turning 17 goals and 169 targets into numbers, setting a threshold for success, and comparing today’s pace with the pace needed by 2030. Each of those steps involves choices, and different official reports make them differently.
From goal to verdict in five steps
Try the trend rule
Trend calculator
Enter an indicator’s 2015 value, its latest value and the green threshold. The defaults are Canada’s fossil CO₂ emissions per person in the SDSN data: 15.73 tonnes in 2015 and 13.49 in 2024, against a green threshold of 2 tonnes. The result matches SDSN’s ‘stagnating’ arrow.
Verdict→ Stagnating
Change achieved per year since 2015
+0.249 in the right direction
Change needed per year to reach the threshold in 2030
0.915
Achieved as a share of needed
27%
Value in 2030 if the recent pace continues
12
Rule: at least 100% of the needed pace is on track; 50–100% is moderately improving; below 50% is stagnating; moving the wrong way is decreasing. A country already past the threshold is on track unless it has slipped since 2015.
Other official ways to judge progress
The verdict you get depends on the method. Comparing methods is one of the most useful skills in SDG monitoring.
What to be careful about
Workshop questions
Explain in your own words why a goal can be rated red even when the country’s goal score is above 70.
Warm-up, Method
Check your reasoning
The colour comes from the two worst indicators on the goal, while the score is the average of all indicators. One or two very weak indicators can make the colour red while strong indicators keep the average high.
In the calculator, keep Canada’s CO₂ values but change the green threshold from 2 to 6 tonnes. What happens to the verdict and why?
Core, Trend rule
Check your reasoning
The needed pace becomes much smaller, so the same achieved pace is a larger share of it. The verdict can move from stagnating to moderately improving, which shows how much the threshold choice drives the conclusion.
Why does the SDG trend rule start in 2015? Name one advantage and one risk of using a fixed base year.
Core, Base year
Check your reasoning
2015 is when the SDGs were adopted, so it measures progress since the commitment. The risk is that an unusual base year (a recession, a commodity boom) makes progress look better or worse than the underlying trend.
For one goal, compare the SDSN verdict for Canada with what the Canadian Indicator Framework shows. If they disagree, explain which indicator or method choice causes the difference.