As systems leaders in networks everywhere who are working to “make things better”, it’s important that we direct our work toward achieving identifiable goals within a framework we can work with to navigate our complex society. The good news is that we now have a U.S. endorsed framework, adopted by most nations around the world, called “The Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs).

Guest blog by Hans R Herren, President of the Millennium Institute, and Steve Arquitt, Senior Modeler at the Millennium Institute. On November 16th, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its United States Sustainable Development Report 2021, and the news is not good.

Today, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s United States Network (SDSN USA) launched the 2021 United States Sustainable Development Report, SDSN’s second report ranking the US states on their progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (SDGs). The results are urgent. To achieve the SDGs, states need to improve scores by an average of approximately 54 points in the next nine years. For reference, over the past five years US states have improved their scores by an average of three points, or a little over half a point a year. No state is on track to achieve the SDGs by 2030 and every state has at least one Goal and at least 20 percent of its indicators that are moving away from, rather than towards, SDG achievement.