What are the UN SDGs?
The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an ambitious but achievable pathway for transforming the world by 2030. In this world, poverty will have been eliminated, everyone will have equitable access to resources, to social justice, social protections, human rights, health & education, and live and share in an environment that is protected, sustained and thriving.
The Importance of Research in Achieving the SDGs
To achieve these goals will of course rely on considerable political will, at all levels of the political sphere but, the goals will never be achieved without significant investment in, and contributions from researchers and experts of all disciplines and nationalities, along with the institutions that support them.
Significant investment and activity will not be enough on its own. To make meaningful inroads into achieving the SDG targets, researchers and institutions alike will need to also make sure their contributions are visible, targeted and usable, in other words – impactful!
How hivve Can Help You
This is where hivve can help! To enable academics and research institutions to track & quantify contributions to the SDGs, from their research and other impactful activities, (e.g. thought leadership, sustainability standards, best practice in terms of employment, widening participation etc), we have updated ImpactTracker and our ImpactMetrics framework, to align more closely with the Sustainable Development Goals and Targets.
Key changes already implemented:
- Academics can easily tag their ImpactTracker projects with relevant SDGs
- Organisational administrators can now pull reports detailing all the SDG-related impacts and activities across the system
We will also be making it easier for users to see which activities and impact indicators are aligned with SDGs, encouraging them to build these elements into their projects and monitor progress. Within the next few months, we will be building visual flags into our system, such that when a user interacts with our taxonomy, they will be able to quickly see if a particular indicator or activity is aligned with the SDGs. We will be updating filtering across the system, so users can easily search for projects, indicators and activities that are aligned with specific SDGs.
Future Updates
Other key changes over the next year will be updates in terms of monitoring progress. Project owners will be able to add in key milestones to their projects, which can be linked to specific impact targets or activities. We will also be building in the capacity to aggregate impact indicator data across projects, so administrators and research managers can quantify the impact achieved to date.
All these changes will be accompanied by updates to the export of data from the system, enabling administrators to extract data in the most useful and usable format for their particular institutional needs, meaning you can use Tracker to track, document and report on your institution’s contribution to the SDGs and consequently to transforming the world!
If you would like to find out more about our ImpactTracker, feel free to contact us at sales@hivve.tech. We are more than happy to answer any queries you may have.
SDG Progress
In 2021 we launched TrackImpact.org, which enables you to publish your impact projects alongside the SDGs that they affect. Go take a look at some of the hundreds of projects from around the world!