Envisioning energy sustainability: An SDG 7 synthetic index and novel tangential policy framework across 40 countries

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 is proposed to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. The progress towards SDG 7 is paramount for accomplishing the Paris Agreement, decarbonization, and climate action. Therefore, monitoring the progress of countries towards attaining SDG 7 is crucial. This study improves the existing SDG 7 composite index from the previous work of the first author and termed it as SDG 7 synthetic index for assessing the energy sustainability performance of various countries. This study is propounded as a research work in terms of improved SDG 7 index and its application to the selected 40 nations around the world. A novel scenario-based tangential policy suggestions has been proposed for the obtained results to conceive SDG 7. The SDG 7 synthetic index consists of six criteria covering the dimensions of clean energy, carbon intensity, energy security, energy intensity, energy accessibility and energy affordability. These 6 criteria are built from twelve sub-criteria to accurately depict the performance of a country towards SDG 7. Overall, 40 countries have been selected across the globe for evaluation using SDG 7 synthetic index. The methodology of the evaluation process includes data acquisition, normalization, weightage allocation and aggregation. The energy sustainability assessment through the synthetic index highlights that Norway, Iceland and Costa Rica attain the top rank with scores (on a scale of 0 to 1) of 0.8035, 0.6906, and 0.6756, respectively. The entrenched SDG 7 synthetic index can be utilised to annually monitor the relative progress of countries and to concentrate the policy efforts on establishing energy sustainability.