Author(s)

DALIA I. LOPEZ-TAPIA, ANA E. SOSA-FLORES, IÑAKI PALESTINO-DIAZ, LUIS F. ACOSTA-SOTO, SAMIRA HOSSEINI

Abstract

Upon establishing 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the United Nations invited countries across the globe to take active roles in addressing challenges faced by our planet. This international calling required actions at individual and collective levels to meet Agenda 2030. Six years later, we intend to take a close look at actions taken by stakeholders, decision-makers, and academics to this call. We analyze the database of published scholarly articles to identify: (1) What is the status of research progress in addressing these SDGs over the course of the past 6 years?; (2) Which countries were actively involved and have pioneered in proposing solutions to the problems of our planet?; (3) What are the subject areas associated with these research projects?; and (4) What is the share of women in addressing these challenges and proposing solutions as opposed to men? The findings of this research suggest SDGs 5, 13, 4, 15, and 2 as the most researched goals, respectively, while SDGs 17 and 16 received the least attention from the research community. Overall, the number of evidenced documents has systematically increased over years since the establishment of the SDGs. This increasing trend has seen a boost in 2019 which has rapidly grown in the window of 2019 to 2020. Female researchers have had a 60% share in research addressing SDGs 5 and 11 as their highest contributions. The second highest involvements of female researchers were in SDGs 8 and 16 with 50% share in the investigation. Male researchers, on the other hand, were fully devoted to addressing SDG 7 (100% involvement) followed by SDGs 13 and 15 (85%), and SDG 10 (75%). Overall, our study aims to shed light on the degree of responsibility we commit to for correcting past mistakes and creating a more sustainable world for inhabitants.

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals, SDG progress, United Nations, gender inequality, climate change, poverty, data gap