As the 2030 deadline for the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approaches, new research suggests the way progress is measured could shape how success is understood.
Adopted in 2015, the SDGs set a 15‑year global framework to improve lives and reduce inequality by 2030, with recent reports focusing on how close countries are to meeting those targets.
Countries track progress toward the goals using large global datasets that compile indicators such as health outcomes, environmental conditions and social factors. These data are combined into scores that rank performance and enable comparisons across nations.
The methods used to build those rankings, however, can influence the results – and how close countries appear to be meeting the goals by 2030.
A by 91ÑÇÉ« researchers Raha Imanirad, an assistant professor at the , and Zijiang Yang, a professor in the School of Information Technology, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, examines how different calculation approaches affect how performance in different nations is understood. The study focuses on SDG 3 – Good Health and Well-Being.
The researchers applied this framework to global health data from 177 World Health Organization member states between 2019 and 2023. Using indicators such as maternal mortality, infectious disease rates, air pollution‑related deaths, road traffic fatalities and homicide rates, they assessed how rankings shift under different methods.
They found that calculation approaches can significantly change how countries appear to perform. More flexible methods tend to cluster many countries at the top, suggesting broadly similar outcomes and stronger overall progress toward the 2030 targets. Stricter, more consistent approaches produce fewer top rankings and clearer distinctions between countries.
These differences matter; because these rankings are used to assess progress toward the 2030 goals, the choice of method can influence whether progress appears widespread or uneven as the deadline approaches.
The analysis also found that no country achieved a perfect score once data uncertainty was considered, suggesting earlier assessments may have been overly optimistic.
The researchers note that no single method captures the full complexity of public health performance. Some approaches highlight top results and make countries appear stronger, while others produce more consistent comparisons but lower scores. Methods that account for uncertainty offer a more cautious picture, the study suggests.
By combining these approaches, the study proposes a more balanced and transparent way to compare countries, one better suited to assessing progress on SDG 3 as the 2030 deadline approaches.
Findings suggest this type of framework could help policymakers identify and focus on specific gaps, such as air quality, disease prevention and maternal health, in the final years leading up to 2030. As the deadline nears, the study underscores how measurement choices can shape how progress is tracked and how success – and areas for improvement – are understood.