Moving the world into a safe space - The GAPFRAME methodology

In September 2015 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an ambitious global agreement. To advance implementation of the SDGs, a new framework − the GAPFRAME − has been developed and published in this journal (Muff, Kapalka, Dyllick, 2017). The GAPFRAME highlights the gap between the current state of the world and a desired future state, defined as a “safe space”. It can be used as a planning tool to identify long-term business opportunities, and as an educational tool to sensitize students to relevant sustainability problems and their priorities.
The www.gapframe.org website provides free access to the data collected for 196 countries and 22 regions across the world. The website was launched to provide decision-makers and stakeholders with aggregated information on the priority issues to be urgently addressed. It focuses attention on addressing identified priority issues, holding each country or region accountable for the successful implementation of the global sustainability targets.
In this article, we explain in detail the GAPFRAME methodology, covering the different steps in the design of the framework, in scaling, normalization, weighting, and aggregating the information collected for the GAPFRAME Index V1 version.