Foreign PolicyForeign Policy

The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable at All

By Jason Hickel

30 Sep 2020 · 5 min read

There are big problems with the most important metric used to assess progress toward the U.N.'s environmental goals.

In 2015, the world’s governments signed on to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a commitment to bring the global economy back into balance with the living world. Now, five years later, as the U.N. General Assembly convenes online to discuss the global ecological crisis, everyone wants to know how countries are performing.

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