At last September’s major U.N. SDG midpoint summit, a downcast narrative prevailed. Official statements stressed only 15% of the targets being on track, and many going in reverse. The U.N. Secretary-General (2023) called for an SDG “rescue plan.” Nature, the eminent scientific journal, asserted prior to the summit that the world’s effort “to make humanity sustainable is failing.”
There is little argument that societies around the world are navigating many complicated economic, social, and environmental issues at once. The SDGs put a framework and metrics to many of these diverse problems. But the complexity of underlying trends does not lend itself to tidy simplifications. A more nuanced diagnosis of the dynamics is important to inform problem-solving over the SDG “second half” out to 2030. To this end, this paper offers an assessment of SDG-relevant empirical trends to date.