Sustainability is an increasingly central issue in Italian and international debate. Through sustainability, guidelines are provided for changing global and local strategies that are found to be detrimental to the environment and human survival. The word sustainability is often associated with concepts such as ecosystem protection, use of renewable resources, and, in general, environmentally conscious behavior. However, while environmentalism is part of sustainability, the concept also includes economic development and social equity. The concept of sustainability has thus a more multidimensional interpretation and touches many aspects of people’s lives.
The availability of statistics and data in this area is growing, making it possible to measure a great many aspects and evaluate the environmental, economic, and social policy actions that characterize the development of our country. The Statistical Indicators of Equitable and Sustainable Welfare produced by Istat and the monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under the U.N. 2030 Agenda are just two of the most important and obvious examples of the attention that sustainability is also getting from the point of view of data and information production.
In addition, the Next Generation EU Plan and the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR) adopted in Europe and Italy in 2021 will push many countries toward the green transition by increasingly promoting sustainable investments. The adoption of the Green Asset Taxonomy Regulation has encouraged an ambitious project to achieve a European benchmark for sustainable finance as part of the green transition. The aim is to ensure decarbonization pathways that are systemic, robust, transparent, and shared by all stakeholders. Moreover, by 2050, they must be well aligned with the goal of climate neutrality that the European Union is preparing to enshrine in its first climate law.
The huge amount of data produced so far, but even more to be produced in the coming years, in the field of sustainability needs to be treated with statistical rigor and scientific method. Therefore, as a group, SIS-SVQS, we believe that statistical-informatics methodologies for the construction of multidimensional and composite indicators can be a viable option for objective assessment of the quality of policy actions aimed at ecological transition and sustainability.