Shedding light on SDG indicators under FAO’s custodianship

In two pieces published by the Journal of Sustainability Research and Nature Plants, FAO staff speak to the challenges of measuring SDG indicators and highlight the Organization’s efforts in strengthening the statistical capacities of countries to better support evidence-based national policy making.

FAO is the designated United Nations custodian agency for 21 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators and a contributing agency for another five — covering over 10% of the entire SDG global indicator framework. This expanded role reflects the Organization’s significant involvement in supporting countries’ efforts to monitor SDG targets.

In the first piece, “The Challenge of Measuring Agricultural Sustainability in All Its Dimensions”, the authors deal with the “long and hotly debated development process” of SDG indicator 2.4.1. They provide the user community with an essential instrument to understand the strengths and limitations of this indicator and to interpret its results at national, regional and global levels. The second piece, “The FAO contribution to monitoring SDGs for food and agriculture”, highlights a number of initiatives that FAO is taking to strengthen the statistical capacities of countries and enable them to produce and report timely and reliable basic food and agriculture data.