Multi-country SDGs indicator projections involving impacts of economic shocks: A protocol applied to the COVID-19 pandemic for ASEAN-5 countries.

Economies often experience large shocks, necessitating the revision of development indicator forecasts, including Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators. Many of those, predicted for 2030, require continued monitoring and re-estimation of how great the impact of these shocks will be, e.g., comparing the achievements with and without the shocks (counterfactual). In this paper, we design a protocol to create datasets containing 2030 SDGs indicator projection estimates that can be used to monitor the extent to which current economic shocks will affect the trajectories of those indicators. We combine official United Nations Statistics Division (UNSTAT) SDGs indicator data and economic growth projections data and fit them into the protocol. The protocol includes filtering UNSTAT SDGs indicators for regression analysis connecting them with economic growth. We assume that the difference in economic growth projections before and after a shock is primarily caused by the shock. This implies that our protocol is less suitable for an episode of more subtle shocks or shocks with multiple causes. We use these estimates to create the SDGs indicators projection dataset. We applied this to ASEAN-5 countries and the COVID-19 pandemic. The same protocol can be used for other countries as well as other economic shocks.•The protocol is useful to monitor how previous projection trajectories of SDGs indicators are affected by relevant large economic shocks, such as those due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulted dataset can also be used for comparing achievements, with and without shocks (counterfactual).•This protocol can be used by national and international agencies, especially those in charge of planning, monitoring, and evaluating the SDGs agenda. The protocol and the resulting data would also be helpful to researchers working on SDGs issues.•In this paper, the protocol to create the projection dataset of SDGs applies for the ASEAN-5 countries using the COVID-19 shocks. These can also be applied for other countries and other economic shocks.

Baseline data of marine debris in the Indonesia beaches.

This study was conducted around the beaches in Indonesia in order to investigate the level of pollution in the marine environment. Thirteen (13) locations in six (6) regions namely: Seribu Island, Banten, South Java, Biawak Islands, West Papua, and East Nusa making up a total length of 12.84 km of the area were studied. This investigation focused on the debris around isolated beaches, tourist attraction centers, fishing zones and marine protected areas (MPA). The method employed in this study was dependent on the international coastal cleanup form. The samples of debris collected and studied varied from the year 2013 to 2018 for a thorough investigation. The beach debris monitoring equipment revealed information about the distribution, abundance, types and, effects of marine debris on the ecosystem. Moreover, the study showed that the mass of debris collected within the areas listed weighted 1113.10 kg for 34,330 collected items. Also, the average density was noted to range between 1.43 and 5.11 items/m2. However, it was observed that plastic products constituted the highest percentage of the pollutants found in almost all the stations, with plastic bags being the most dominant.

Financing a sustainable ocean economy.

The ocean, which regulates climate and supports vital ecosystem services, is crucial to our Earth system and livelihoods. Yet, it is threatened by anthropogenic pressures and climate change. A healthy ocean that supports a sustainable ocean economy requires adequate financing vehicles that generate, invest, align, and account for financial capital to achieve sustained ocean health and governance. However, the current finance gap is large; we identify key barriers to financing a sustainable ocean economy and suggest how to mitigate them, to incentivize the kind of public and private investments needed for topnotch science and management in support of a sustainable ocean economy.

Rapid and lasting gains from solving illegal fishing.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing global fisheries is that recovery often requires substantial short-term reductions in fishing effort, catches and profits. These costs can be onerous and are borne in the present; thus, many countries are unwilling to undertake such socially and politically unpopular actions. We argue that many nations can recover their fisheries while avoiding these short-term costs by sharply addressing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. This can spur fishery recovery, often at little or no cost to local economies or food provision. Indonesia recently implemented aggressive policies to curtail the high levels of IUU fishing it experiences from foreign-flagged vessels. We show that Indonesia's policies have reduced total fishing effort by at least 25%, illustrating with empirical evidence the possibility of achieving fishery reform without short-term losses to the local fishery economy. Compared with using typical management reforms that would require a 15% reduction in catch and 16% reduction in profit, the approach of curtailing IUU has the potential to generate a 14% increase in catch and a 12% increase in profit. Applying this model globally, we find that addressing IUU fishing could facilitate similar rapid, long-lasting fisheries gains in many regions of the world.