Exploring the Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on Sustainability Trends
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The SDGs have made a significant contribution to the sustainability movement, being used by many organisations from across sectors all over the world as their sustainability framework. However, have they impacted the previous trend of sustainability challenges just because of their existence? This article aims to contribute to answering this question by statistically comparing the trends in the sustainability performance of the SDGs before and after they were launched in 2015. Data were collected for every SDG and their trends were quantitatively assessed using non-parametric tests, finding that most of the SDGs have not significantly improved and that most of the sustainability indicators are still performing poorly in developing countries. While this research is exploratory and does not assess the direct impact of the SDGs on sustainability, it suggests that for the most part, the SDGs have not significantly changed sustainability trends since they were launched in 2015, which is a concerning finding. This article should serve as a wake-up call to design more suitable sustainability frameworks as the SDGs expire in 2030, and for those using them to be more critical of their reach rather than being satisfied with a framework that although helping will not achieve its main goal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".