In September 2015 in New York, world leaders agreed on the transformational 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with an ambitious set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets. SDG 16 calls on the world to achieve peace and inclusive societies. PRIO is committed to doing research for a more peaceful world. By working with a wide ra nge of UN agencies, national governments, national statistical offices, and NGOs from around the world, PRIO strives to support the SDG agenda.
How violent is the world today compared to earlier? Where are the conflict hotspots and where were they? The map shows bubbles proportional to 'conflict related deaths' per 100,000 inhabitants. Data on conflict related deaths come from UCDP's armed conflict, non-state conflict, and one sided violence datasets, and from PRIO's Lacina-Gleditsch battle deaths data.
PRIO is a founding member of the SDG 16 Data Initiative. The SDG16 Data Initiative is a collective project by a consortium of organisations seeking to support the open tracking of the global commitments made by more than 194 countries on peace, justice, and strong institutions.
The initiative aims to complement the current efforts underway to develop an official indicator framework for monitoring the SDGs. The Inter-agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators(IAEG-SDGs) has identified 23 global indicators under SDG16’s 12 targets. It is intended that national statistical systems will eventually produce the majority of the data for these indicators.
Official data availability and coverage is currently limited and it may take years to develop capacities and to collect data for official monitoring through official statistical systems. In the interim, we should draw on available data to help countries get started with monitoring SDG16.
The SDG16 Data Initiative, formed by a group of organisations with expertise in these areas, aims to fill this role. The initiative is an attempt to pull together data sets in an open format to track SDG16 and provide a snapshot of the current situation, and eventually progress over time. To this end, we include both global and complementary indicators, presented with official and unofficial data. The process also seeks to identify potential challenges in data quality, availability, and coverage that need to be addressed.
PRIO is also a member of the Praia Group on Governance Statistics constituted by the UN Statistical Commission and led by the National Statistical Office of Cabo Verde. The Praia group on governance statistics, whose purpose would be to encourage countries to produce governance statistics based on sound and documented methodologies and to address the conceptualization, methodology and instruments needed to produce such statistics. The Praia group will produce a handbook on governance statistics for national statistical offices. Under the Praia umbrella PRIO is focusing its work on how to measure conflict and violence.
SDG 16.1: Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere, where are we?
