Measurement of the “fight against climate change” objective: evidence from European countries

Sustainability is a complex multidimensional framework to be evaluated and measurement tools play a crucial role in this challenge. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, declines sustainability through 17 objectives (17 Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs), to reach by 2030. Among all Goals, here we focus on climate change, that is on Goal 13 “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. With the aim of better monitoring and evaluating sustainability levels of countries and how far they are from achieving their goals, the current study proposes the use of a modified version of the Wroclaw taxonomic method. The proposed index is used to aggregate indicators belonging to Goal 13 for 18 European countries in 2020 and 2021. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed by comparing results with the classical indices used for measuring SDG progress.