Abstract

The European Union has developed several indicator frameworks using partly the same indicators but serving different purposes. These include the EU Sustainable Development Goal indicator set, a resilience dashboard, the monitoring framework for the 8th Environment Action Programme and statistics for the European Green Deal. It is natural to use statistics for these types of indicators sets and then that similar indicators are shown to different audiences.
To communicate the many differently formulated messages to external stakeholders constitute a challenge. Users may want to have a quick overview or be interested to go into comparisons over time or deeper analyses. Identification of the objectives of the monitoring exercises as well as a transparent and easily understandable assessment methodology are of importance.
Different regional monitoring levels, i.e. SDG monitoring at EU level versus monitoring of national SDG strategies, further complicate the situation. Eurostat will present how we have dealt with these challenges and some lessons learned.
Measuring sustainable development means reusing thematic information in a broader context. For statisticians, this is a chance to make use of the whole statistical system. For society, it is a chance to analyse how the social, environmental and economic issues interact in different regions, and to address the policy coherence that is at the heart of sustainable development.
Ideally, the information then can be used to shed light over very general issues and assess for example the situation of vulnerable groups in a country or how sudden crisis affects society at large. At the same time, given the broad audience, the information should ideally be simplified and well explained as all users can be assumed to be non-experts in at least some of the areas.