Dynamical Model for the Sustainable Development Goals
For policymakers and international organizations, this model offers a tool to simulate scenarios for improving SDG progress, though it is an incremental extension of prior work.
The authors develop a dynamical model incorporating resource distribution, international cooperation, and goal correlations to simulate progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, showing it can reproduce real data from 2000-2022 and could be used to explore optimal strategies.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations outlines 17 goals as global challenges for countries of the world to address in their development. However, the progress of countries towards these goals has been much slower than expected. In a previous study, we analyzed the data over two decades (2000--2022), using unsupervised machine learning techniques. Based on this study, we take into account three main factors to construct a mathematical model to simulate and predict the dynamical behavior of the SDGs. These factors are: (1) the distribution of amount of resources that each country uses to meet the goals, (2) the cooperation between countries, and (3) the correlations between the goals. In this work, we show that the model is capable of reproducing the real data and therefore could be used to simulate hypothetical scenarios that could help to improve actions towards optimal fulfillment of the goals.