Assessing progress towards sustainable development over space and time.

To address global challenges, 193 countries have committed to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Quantifying progress towards achieving the SDGs is essential to track global efforts towards sustainable development and guide policy development and implementation. However, systematic methods for assessing spatio-temporal progress towards achieving the SDGs are lacking.

Evolution of multiple global virtual material flows.

The world is connected through multiple flows of material, but a comprehensive assessment of their temporal dynamics and interactions is rare. To address this knowledge gap, we assessed the evolution and interactions of global flows of virtual water, energy, land, CO, nitrogen as well as financial capital embodied in international trade from 1995 to 2008. We found that the volumes of all these flows, except for land flow, increased over time.