The 'From Rio to Jo'burg' Dashboard is an attempt to show how the official UN CSD indicator set could be used for assessing progress, or lack of progress, towards Sustainable Development.
The data have been compiled by John O'Connor from a number of international databases, mostly from the UN system. Please bear in mind that such databases often do not reflect the latest state-of-the-art, especially for OECD countries. The objective of this data compilation was complete country coverage, and a close match to the UN CSD Methodology Sheets, and often accuracy had to be sacrificed for this goal.
Therefore, the rankings presented here should be taken with great caution. While the aggregate indices will often look convincing and plausible (especially for country groups - many small errors tend to compensate each other), for individual indicators there may be huge deviations from the real World.
The blame should neither be put on the Dashboard (it just makes the data more visible), nor on the statistical services who produce indicators under very difficult financial and political restraints. We hope that the 'RioJo' Dashboard will help to demonstrate the need for better co-ordination of data collection, and to advance towards a generally accepted set of core indicators for Sustainable Development.