FAO proposes 29 indicators to monitor SDGs

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has put forward a total of 29 indicators covering eight goals of the July 2014 proposal of the UN General Assembly’s Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to help monitor the post-2015 development agenda.

The FAO report, together with indicators put forward by other UN agencies, entities and regional agencies, is a contribution to discussions on a post-2015 indicator framework, now moving ahead following the first meeting of a working group of the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC), the United Nations Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDG), from 1 to 2 June in New York.

The IAEG-SDG is tasked with developing an indicator framework for monitoring goals and targets of the post-2015 development agenda by the 47th session of the UNSC in March 2016. Indicators, the Commission states, should be “relevant; methodologically sound; measurable; easy to communicate and access; and limited in number and outcome focused at the global level”.

FAO’s proposals comprise both established and potential indicators in areas where the Organization has expertise and experience as the leading UN agency committed to food security and sustainable development. The indicators relate to targets under eight of the 17 goals proposed last year by member states.

Pietro Gennari, FAO’s Chief Statistician and Chair of the Chief Statisticians of the UN System, underlined the challenge of measuring all aspects of the new framework without ending up with an overly large and unworkable number of indicators.

“One guiding principle in the selection of the proposed indicators has been the need to keep the list of indicators that will form the core of the SDG monitoring framework as manageable as possible, while trying to preserve the multidimensional and complex nature of the targets in question,” he said. “(In the FAO report), when more than one indicator is presented for a given target, an effort has been made to clarify whether they should comprise ‘core’ indicators, which could be included in a core set of indicators for a globally relevant monitoring framework, or as ‘additional’ indicators.”

Towards March 2016

The IAEG-SDG, which includes UN agencies as observers, is not expected to sit again before the post-2015 summit on 25 September, but will continue activities “electronically” to meet deadlines set out at the 46th session of the UNSC in March. The road map for developing and implementing an indicator framework includes: July 2015 - the development of a first note on possible global indicators and an indicator framework; December 2015 - a proposal from the IAEG-SDGs on global indicators and an indicator framework for consideration by the UNSC; March 2016 - the endorsement of the indicator framework at UNSC47.