The Follow-Up of SDGs May Require New Instruments of Measurement in the Region

Monitoring the indicators of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may necessitate new instruments of measurement, which will require that agreements be forged in the region to implement a harmonized follow-up of the 2030 Agenda, Antonio Prado, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said on Wednesday, March 30, during the XX Meeting of the Forum of Ministers of Environment of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Prado participated in the first session of the ministerial meeting held through this Thursday in Cartagena, Colombia, where he specifically referred to SDG 10 (which aims to reduce inequalities within and among countries), SDG 11 (on sustainable cities and communities), and SDG 12 (which seeks to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns). Regarding the second one of these, it will likely be necessary, for example, to agree to a statistical standard to achieve the comparability of cities over time.

Participants in the panel, focused on the matter of sustainable development, included Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); Sergio Bergman, Argentina’s Environment Minister; and Dennis Lowe, the Environment Minister of Barbados. The talk was moderated by Paula Caballero Gómez, Senior Director of the World Bank’s Environment and Natural Resources Global Practice.

Prado called for enriching the work of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA), a subsidiary body of ECLAC, in close coordination with the United Nations Statistics Division. This implies, he said, that the region’s governments provide adequate budgetary resources to the institutes in charge of producing statistics.

Additionally, the senior representative posed the need to adopt integrated national accounts, which means implementing the environmental accounts according to the standard adopted internationally: the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) of 2012.

During his participation, Prado highlighted that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as well as the climate change agenda require making simultaneous transformations in the fields of public finances, planning and public and private investment. “Complying with SDG 12 demands a new culture of sustainable consumption and an ethical-value change that must go beyond the technological changes for achieving cleaner production in terms of processes, energy and materials,” Prado said.

The current regional situation makes it advisable for countries to explore new mechanisms of financing, for example, through a green tax reform, which would include reducing tax evasion and avoidance and gradually decreasing, and socially compensating for, subsidies that are harmful to the environment, he said.