Assessing national sustainability conditions through an SDG-based composite indicator: implications for environmental, urban and agricultural planning

The assessment of sustainable development conditions at the national level requires indices that are not only internationally comparable but also useful for environmental planning. Despite the existence of many sustainability indices in international datasets, the combination of these indices into an analytical framework has been underutilized. The current research employed sustainability indices aligned with the SDGs to analyze national-level sustainability conditions important for environmental, urban and agricultural planning and discourse. The research used 27 World Bank indices across 84 countries with populations above 10 million for the years 2012-2020. All indicators were normalized to a common 0–1 scale using min-max normalization and adjusted according to their direction of interpretation, so that higher values consistently represent more favorable sustainability conditions. On this basis, countries were grouped into relative performance classes, allowing the identification of broad strengths, weaknesses, and areas of concern. The results reveal clear differences in sustainability conditions across countries. Among all the regions, Northern and Western European countries tend to score more favorably. This can be attributed to their relative success in delivering services, managing infrastructure and the environment, as well as their socioeconomic capacity. On the contrary, some Sub-Saharan African countries, as well as those in South Asia, score poorly. In conclusion, this proposed approach, which converts heterogeneous measures into a coherent composite, enables the creation of a transparent tool for benchmarking sustainability and environmental planning at the national level.