This volume presents North American best practices and perspectives on developing, managing and monitoring indicators to track development progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in local communities and cities. In 4 main sections, the book presents and frames the many ways in which community indicator programs are either integrating or retooling to integrate the SDGs into their existing frameworks, or how they are developing new programs to track and report progress on the SDGs. This is the first volume that focuses on SDG adoption within the context of North Americans cities and communities, and the unique issues and opportunities prevalent in these settings. The chapters are developed by experienced academics and practitioners of community planning and sustainable development, and will add broad perspective on public policy, organizational management, information management and data visualization. This volume presents a case-study approach to chapters, offering lessons that can be used by three main audiences: 1) teachers and researchers in areas of urban, regional, and environmental planning, urban development, and public policy; 2) professional planners, decision-makers, and urban managers; and 3) sustainability activists and interested groups.

The Bank should strengthen its use of international comparisons and trend analysis rather than increasing its use of target setting; the use of demographic and health surveys should be the rule, not the exception, in Bank population and health projects; and more attention should be given to program- level than to project- level performance.

Sustainability indicators should implement the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Indicators in literature often consider large sets of actions and are thus complex in application. Therefore, this work derives energy- and resource-related SDG indicators for communities and municipalities with low complexity. Moreover, this work analyzes three different policy paths to promote SDG contribution. The policy paths consider SDG target settings and two different incentive schemes in the form of penalties and investment subsidies. The indicators and policy actions are applied in two case studies for communities and municipalities in Austria. Therefore, an optimization model that considers the case study setups, SDG targets and policy actions is developed. The modeling approach shows applicability and positive contribution to sustainable development by indicators. Moreover, the results show the applicability of the three policy paths. Implementing the target-setting path directly leads to the desired SDG targets and provides insights into the costs for target achievement. The incentive scheme paths also lead to selected targets, but they require a cost assessment of the provided incentive schemes. A combination of both incentive schemes leads to the lowest costs. However, policymakers should implement a workflow that considers all three policy paths for policy action settings.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

The aim of this report is to present an overview of the 17 Goals using data currently available to highlight the most significant gaps and challenges.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set a broad and ambitious programme for the world to achieve by 2030. With 17 Goals, underpinned by 169 Targets, the complex and integrated nature of the 2030 Agenda presents national governments with huge challenges for implementation. To assist countries, the OECD has developed a unique methodology allowing comparison of progress across SDG goals and targets.

Currently the writing on the subject is limited and comprises, for the most part, guidance documents and completed assessments.