The National Blueprint Framework: A proposal for a set of water-related indicators to monitor progress on SDGs

Abstract

With the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were created to continue the international agreements for sustainable development. Building on the eight goals in the MDGs, the SDGs include 17 goals, including a specific goal for water, SDG 6. The goals are designed for all countries, compared to the MDGs which focussed on the global south. This leads to the goals, their targets and associated indicators being designed for a global audience, with each country having different baselines and feasible final situations in 2030. The study was commissioned by AIWW 2019 and Waternet to show the current progress and challenges in water related SDGs at a national level in Europe. To achieve this the following research question was addressed: What indicators can be used to create a water management framework to be used globally, which complements indicators used for the SDGs? This study provides a new perspective on monitoring the SDGs. To assess the current environment of water management indicators, a database has been developed of integrated water resources management (IWRM) indicators which were then correlated against the SDG targets and indicators to identify which could be used for monitoring the progress towards achieving the SDGs. From here a proposal for a National Blueprint Framework (NBF) was created comprising of 24 water-related indicators, centred around SDG 6, each with an associated target. The SDG indicators are a useful framework for monitoring progress towards water-related targets, but there are clear limitations. Firstly, some of the SDG indicators are not SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Secondly, important aspects of the European policy agenda (e.g. water in the circular economy) are currently not included. Thirdly, in some areas clear policy targets are lacking, whereas quantitative policy targets would really aid to the communication of progress of the SDGs in general. In the NBF proposal these aspects have now all been addressed. Instead of measuring the current state, or the trend over time, the NBF indicators can be used to measure the progression towards achieving the target (distance-to-target) for each indicator by 2030. In this way, the results will show how far countries have come, and which areas require the most focus. This is essential because “what is measured, will get managed and can be communicated”. The proposed indicators and targets of the NBF will need further international discussion at the science-policy interface to obtain broad international acceptance. The scores of the indicators showed a low standard deviation for the EU28, ranging from less than one to four. However, they also showed low levels of correlation between the indicators suggesting that the NBF framework had no internal dependencies. Whilst the national level scores correlated with city-level water management scores within the EU28, suggesting that it is applicable for monitoring in Europe, the framework was less successful for non-EU countries due to lack of data availability and EU-centric targets for each indicator. This needs further research and political attention as the most important direct water-related challenges are not within Europe but outside Europe.