16 November 2022
SEI Launches Tool to Assess Policies, Projects Against All 17 SDGs
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Considering how a given intervention might affect progress towards the SDGs can help gauge its societal benefits.

However, in some contexts, actions that contribute to achieving one Goal may undermine progress towards another.

The Agenda 2030 Compass helps to quantify, visualize, and compare how different action options contribute “societal value” across the SDGs, to maximize co-benefits, minimize trade-offs, and enable stakeholders to make more informed decisions.

The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) has launched its Agenda 2030 Compass – a tool that allows users to evaluate the merits of a given investment option, research strategy, or policy by assessing direct and indirect impacts on the SDGs, to achieve maximum societal benefits.

SEI notes that businesses, governments, and civil society around the world “are increasingly committed to achieving sustainability” and that considering how a given intervention might affect progress towards the SDGs can help gauge its societal benefits. It warns, however, that in some contexts, actions that contribute to achieving one Goal may undermine progress towards another.

The Agenda 2030 Compass helps to quantify, visualize, and compare how different action options contribute “societal value” across the SDGs, to maximize co-benefits, minimize trade-offs, and enable stakeholders to make more informed decisions.

The Agenda 2030 Compass is described in a report by the same title as a “scientifically robust process” that consists of two stages:

  • The Context Mapper, which identifies potential positive or negative interactions among the SDGs in a particular context, based on socioeconomic conditions, the energy mix, and the physical environment, among other factors; and
  • The Strategy Analyzer, which provides “a simple, robust workshop-based process and toolbox to analyze the sustainability implications of a planned intervention within that context.”

The tool can be used to analyze “a single strategy in a single context, several alternative strategies in a single context, or a single strategy across several contexts.”

According to SEI, the Agenda 2030 Compass can be used in a range of settings, having been successfully tested both in the public and private sectors, including case studies involving product design, housing development, and local and regional strategies in Sweden and India.

The Agenda 2030 Compass was developed through an inclusive, co-creation-based process, whereby an online platform helped gather input on SDG interactions from around the world, with greater participation from experts in the Global South.

The tool was developed by SEI and the Swedish Steel and Iron Producers’ Association Jernkontoret, in partnership with MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the company Swedwise. It was launched on 10 November, in the margins of the Sharm El-Sheikh Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 27) in Egypt. [Publication: Agenda 2030 Compass] [Publication Landing Page] [SEI Press Release] [SEI Feature] [SDG Knowledge Hub Story about Agenda 2030 Compass Project]


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