The Addis Ababa Action Agenda aims to develop specific measures and tools.
The Addis Agenda specifically:
- Calls on the UN system, in consultation with the international financial institutions, to develop transparent measurements of progress on sustainable development that go beyond per capita income; these should recognize poverty in all of its forms and dimensions, and the social, economic and environmental dimensions of domestic output and structural gaps at all levels
- Commits to seek to develop and implement tools to mainstream sustainable development, as well as to monitor sustainable development impacts for different economic activities, including for sustainable tourism
Latest developments
The measurement of environmental sustainability has been advanced through the System of Environmental Economic Accounts (SEEA), which includes monitoring of negative externalities such as emission of pollutants, and the measurement of natural resources (and of their depletion), among others. Increasing efforts have also been made over the past decade to emphasize indicators of economic welfare both within the national accounts framework as well as beyond it to better measure people’s living conditions. These include the IMF Sixth Statistical Forum on Measuring Economic Welfare in the Digital Age: What and How?; the OECD dashboard on households’ economic well-being; the World Bank’s wealth accounting initiative; and the Eurostat-OECD data on more granular distributional information on income, consumption, saving and wealth of households.
Read more on the measurements of sustainable development beyond GDP here.