Accountability and adaptive management of recent global agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement, will in part rely on the ability to track progress toward the social and environmental targets they set. Current metrics and monitoring systems, however, are not yet up to the task. We argue that there is an imperative to consider principles of coherence (what to measure), standardization (how to measure) and decision-relevance (why to measure) when designing monitoring schemes if they are to be practical and useful. New approaches that have the potential to match the necessary scale of monitoring, with sufficient accuracy and at reasonable cost, are emerging; although, they represent a significant departure from the historical norm in some cases. Iterative review and adaptation of analytical approaches and available technology will certainly be needed to continuously design ways to best track our progress.

对诸如可持续发展目标和《巴黎气候协定》之类的近期全球协议的问责制和适应性管理，将部分依赖于跟踪实现其设定的社会和环境目标的进展的能力。但是，当前的指标和监视系统尚未完成任务。我们认为，在设计监测方案时，如果要切实可行，就必须考虑连贯性（衡量标准），标准化（如何衡量）和决策相关性（为何衡量）的原则。正在出现有可能以足够的准确性和合理的成本与必要的监测规模相匹配的新方法；但是，在某些情况下，它们与历史规范存在重大差异。