The UN has been working on sustainability since 1992, and have had several different meetings to assess, recalculate, and continue working towards their goals. They currently have an initiative, made in January of 2015, which is the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In this initiative, they have outlined 17 different goals that need to be addressed. There is an annual meeting to discuss the progress towards these goals, called the High Level Political Forum, where they use Voluntary National Reviews in their analysis. Voluntary National Reviews are when a country will essentially audit themselves, and bring their reports which are all encompassing to the meeting for analysis. The way that the High Level Political Forum is able to assess the progress of each sustainability goal, is through smaller goals within the initial 17, and accompanying statistics that illustrate the overall change occuring. For instance, Goal 1 is to end extreme poverty. Within that goal, they have a target to eradicate extreme poverty measured as people living on less than $1.25 per day, which gives them a clear line of what they wish to accomplish, and something easily measurable. Each of the 17 SDGs coincides with parts of the triple bottom line, though is less easily divided into the 6-Cell Matrix, because it is looking at countries and populations, rather than small businesses. This causes each of the goals to line up with multiple parts of the matrix, but still contains valuable information in analyzing how the goals are divided, analyzed, and implemented. By having these as a reference point, we will be able to better apply the 6-Cell Matrix, and keep a larger perspective in mind.
For more information, visit https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org