Progress Towards Affordable and Clean Energy: A Comparative Analysis of SDG7 Implementation

Progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) is currently insufficient to achieve. It is particularly important to ensure that all people have access to sustainable, reliable and affordable energy. As SDG7 is linked to other goals, a lack of progress in its implementation could disrupt the entire sustainable development process. The aim of our article is to compare selected countries around the world in terms of the degree of SDG7 implementation and its dynamics in the years 2000–2022. We assessed the degree of SDG7 implementation using Hellwig’s method in the dynamic approach, and we compared the dynamics of the degree of implementation using the dynamic time warping (DTW) method and hierarchical clustering. The cluster of countries with the highest degree of SDG7 implementation included the European countries of Norway, Sweden and Iceland. The lowest degree of implementation was observed in Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The dynamic approach to the problem allowed us to conclude that there was an increase in the synthetic measure in all the countries analysed in the period 2000–2022, with the strongest increase observed in the countries with the lowest initial degree of SDG7 implementation (Belarus, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan).