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Launch of Pilot Youth SDG Index for Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific

By SDSN Youth Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific

SDSN AusNZPac Youth has launched the ‘Towards an AusNZPac Youth SDG Index’, a youth-led report that is the first in the world to use the Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs) framework to measure young people’s progress towards sustainable development.

The report found that young people were lagging behind the general population on many of the SDGs examined, showing the value and importance of using the SDGs to measure youth progress.

The SDGs have been used extensively to measure national and sub-national progress on sustainable development as tools for policy makers and advocates to identify where sustainable challenges remain and to ensure no one is left behind. However, very little mention of youth is made in these exercises, making them practically invisible in SDG progress assessments.

To remedy this gap, SDSN Youth AusNZPac worked in collaboration with over 40 young people from across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region to develop a pilot SDG index to track youth concerns in the region. The project was mentored and supported by the Monash Sustainable Development Institute (MSDI), host of SDSN AusNZPac.

‘Towards an AusNZPac Youth SDG Index’ reports on the 13 priority SDG targets identified by the team, relating to SDG 1 (poverty), SDG 2 (food insecurity), SDG 3 (health), SDG 7 (sustainable energy), SDG 8 (decent work), SDG 10 (inequality), SDG 11 (sustainable communities), SDG 13 (climate change) and SDG 16 (good governance). It includes a summary dashboard for youth progress relative to the general population, graphs of the data found, and commentaries and testimonials from young people about the targets.

The team are calling for others to further develop and replicate this exercise elsewhere, as a tool for ensuring that young people – and other overlooked groups – are not left behind in developing SDG reporting frameworks.

The report and additional resources can be downloaded here. You can find the full announcement on the SDSN AusNZPac website.