Assessment of progress towards Sustainable Development Goals in Chinese urban agglomerations

Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals; city-level progress; urban agglomerations
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires the engagement of cities, the
engines for implementing the SDGs. Tracking the sustainable development progress of cities
over time can help identify development priorities for SDGs improvement and provide
evidence-based policy recommendations. However, significant knowledge gaps exist in
assessing city-level SDGs progress with small and big data, especially for cities in Chinese
urban agglomerations. In addition to emphasizing the improvement of the SDG Index score
(average score of 17 individual goals), the evenness among 17 goals also should be considered
in the city-level assessment. This study focused on providing a comprehensive and accurate
city-level sustainability assessment by integrating multi-source small and big data into the
construction of a city-level indicator framework and incorporating the evenness score into the
development of city-level assessment methods. Ideal and uneven development paths were
compared to revisit the development trajectory in five Chinese national urban agglomerations
from 2010 to 2020. Results indicated that, despite significant city-level SDGs progress, the
achievement of sustainable development could be hindered by the continued uneven status of
all goals. Evenness is necessary to assess and guide sustainable development at the urban
agglomeration scale.