Measuring Sustainable Development Goal Progress in Pakistan: An Environment-Centered Composite Sustainability Index

The monitoring of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in developing countries does not pay importance to the significance of environmental constraints in determining development outcomes. In Pakistan, the systematic constraints to economic and social development are water scarcity, air pollution, land degradation, and climate-based disasters. This paper creates an environment-based composite SDG index to evaluate the performance of Pakistan on national sustainability indicators, in the year 2015–2022. The index combines environmental, social, and economic data, where the focus is clearly on the ecological aspects, and it is based on Min-Max normalization, geometric aggregation, and robustness tests that utilize the principal component analysis. Findings have shown that social and economic indicators show medium rates of improvement, whereas environmental indicators show the lowest scores on a regular basis and limit the overall SDG development. The key restricting factors become water stress, exposure to particulate matter, and disasters associated with climate, which undermines health gains, education gains, and economic productivity gains. Its results emphasize that environmental sustainability and development effects depend on one another structurally, and the traditional SDG indicators might be overly optimistic about the progress in underestimating the ecological stress. Implications of the policy also involve putting environment-first planning first, enhancing interprovincial planning by putting in place composite indices in national SDG monitoring frameworks, and focus development assistance in areas that are sensitive to climate change. The research gives a clear, repeatable methodological design of a country-specific sustainability evaluation and presents a practical contribution to the policymaker that aims at synchronizing development practices with the ecological facts in the climatic-prone areas.