India is the only low-income country that has made tremendous progress towards SDG 15
SDG 14 (life below the water) and SDG 15 (life on land) of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) specifically target biodiversity protection and sustainable development. A recent analysis that evaluated SDG 14 and 15 scores between 2010 and 2020 and identified nations and regions with high and low SDG scores has been published in iScience. India has performed rather well on SDG 15. India, along with Norway, are just behind Croatia and the United Arab Emirates, which have achieved the most progress in SDG 15 scores. “India is the only low-income country that made exceptional SDG 15 progress (>50),” notes the report.
For SDG 15, only Israel, Greenland, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Italy, Uzbekistan, and Kenya made any progress, while Guadeloupe, Svalbard, Jan Mayen, American Samoa, Martinique, Gibraltar, Puerto Rico, French Polynesia, Mayotte, and Réunion experienced a decrease, the research revealed. Pakistan, Fiji, and Tonga experienced a major decrease between 2011 and 2019.
Despite an overall improvement in the SDG 15 score between 2010 and 2020, there were significant regional differences in the rate of development.
Between 2010 and 2020, both SDGs 14 and 15 saw overall gains in scores: Scores for SDG 14 increased from 47.79 to 49.69 by 3.96%. Score for SDG 15 increased significantly (by more than 112%), from 26.28 to 55.94,
While SDG 14 focuses on conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development (life below water), SDG 15 is about protecting, restoring, and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably managing forests, combating desertification, halting and reversing land degradation, and halting biodiversity loss (life on land).
The implementation of the UN's SDGs in 2015 did not help all nations advance towards marine sustainability, even though both SDGs 14 and 15 scores rose between 2010 and 2020. This is because the growth of SDG 14 scores between 2015 and 2019 was slower than that between 2011 and 2015.
“Only the target of conserving coastal and marine areas made small progress between 2011 and 2017 and plateaued between 2017 and 2019. Other SDG 14 targets were barely improved in terms of preventing and reducing marine pollution or even experienced a loss of economic benefits to small island developing states and least developed countries from the sustainable use of marine resources. A large gap still exists to fulfill marine conservation and sustainable development needs, and more proactive actions should be taken to speed up marine conservation and sustainability,” according to the report.