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IPS175 Jillian C. et al.
3. Result
The IAEG-SDGs was established in 2015 to develop the SDG indicator
framework (UN, 2015b). In order to do so, the IAEG-SDGs conducted an open
consultation involving a wide range of stakeholders from across government,
civil society, academia and regional and international organizations (UN, n.d.).
From a conceptual perspective, the SDG indicators were developed in order to
capture an ideal, ambitious monitoring framework for development, including
environmental state, trends and impacts. However, from a practical
perspective, the SDG indicator framework took into account an interest in
increasing synergies with existing processes (e.g. the Millennium Development
Goals, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, etc.) in order to reduce
the reporting burden for countries, increase feasibility and capitalize on prior
experiences of national statistical offices (UNSC, 2016). Despite the interest in
using existing indicators, when the original tier classification was developed in
2016, 50% of environment-related SDG indicators were classified as Tier III as
compared to 28% of the remaining indicators. There has been significant
progress to develop methodologies and reporting mechanisms for the SDGs
and as of May 2019, 26% of the environment-related SDG indicators are Tier
III compared to 7% of the other indicators (Table 2).

Table 2. SDG indicators by Tier, 2016 and 2019
Percentage of Percentage of Percentage of
Tier I Tier II Tier III
2016 2019 2016 2019 2016 2019
Environment-related
SDGs 26% 23% 24% 37% 51% 26%
All other SDG indicators 53% 51% 19% 42% 28% 7%

Country level reporting depends on various factors like the capacity of
national statistical offices, data availability and political interest. Most
indicators rely directly on national capacity and reporting of national data.
However, a few use international estimates and models for reporting and gaps
filling such as SDG 8.4.2 on material flows and SDG 6.6.1 on water-related
ecosystems. Holistic measurement of the environment is complicated by a lack
of existing globally-agreed methodologies related to specific SDG targets and
the fact that many statistical offices do not have experience in compiling
environment statistics or environmental economic accounts (UN, 2015c) thus
global modelling provides an opportunity to fill data gaps. Out of the 244
indicators in the SDG framework, less that 5% (11 indicators) are related to
environmental state and trends (Figure 1).

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