A Step Forward, But Still Short by Schubert de Abreu

This piece dives into the progress made on a global level towards achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through data on world poverty, hunger and health.

Armed with the rosy pictures of success stories on the news, innovations in green technology, billions contributed to humanitarian efforts, I assumed that steady progress was being made towards the goals and initially wanted to explore how the global pandemic slowed down progress and if it caused any delay to us achieving the SDG targets by 2030.

However, on researching the topic I quickly realised that a lot of my assumptions were just plain wrong - in many critical areas we weren't on track to hit the targets even before COVID-19. In fact, in some developing nations, things just got worse since 2015.

In this entry I try to look at the data and try to understand where we stood before the pandemic, where did we fall behind, and paint a more realistic picture of what the effort required to achieve these targets will look like going forwards.

The interactives are created in Javascript using Svelte + D3 along with charts created with RawGraphs ( edited in Figma ). The code is available here: https://github.com/schubert-da/dvs-world-summit

Scrolling video preview: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B6IIO1RskKcivhSsBt_NBzFUOOB1uR6S?usp=sharing