Goal 7.1 Case Study

To some extent, all of Goal 7's targets are measurable. Targets 7.1 and 7.b's progress could be measured with similar methods, one of them being the determination of the population percentage of each country that possesses access to a certain threshold - the minimum - amount of energy per unit time to be able to survive. This would allow for the observation of the rate of improvement in the expansion of minimal energy access across countries. Target 7.2 could be monitored through the tabulation of the percentages of total energy constituted by renewable energy, which would indicate the proportion of energy produced by renewable resources, which could also allow for the observation of Target 7.a's effectiveness. Despite target 7.3's ambiguity

Target 7.a could also be observed from the financial side of the energy market, by examining the percentage of energy investments used in the renewable energy centre with respect to the entire energy market.

Part 2

Despite the possibilities available as described above, only parts of each of the targets are currently measured, due to the prioritization of the progress of certain targets currently held by the world over other targets. The developing world aspect of Target 7.1 and the effectiveness of Target 7.b - excluding the sustainability aspect - are in part measured by the International Energy Agency (IEA). By setting a minimal energy threshold to qualify as possessing assess to electricity, second and third world countries' access to electricity was measured, which identified the number of

Due to this lack of specification, renewable energy sources that have miniscule recycling percentages and/or low stability rates could erroneously be viewed as a valid inclusion to the evaluation of the sustainable and/or stable energy, as seen in the wind turbine's lack of stable power production - a renewable but non-reliable source. (Song et al., 2016) The lack of specification of "affordable" energy in the targets could also prove to be problematic, as the economic well-being of the general people with respect to energy prices could be misinterpreted without this specification. One notable example of the possibility of such misunderstanding is India, where the rate of economic growth overall is far higher than the rate of increase in the number of people with access to electricity, stemming from the skewed distribution of wealth in India's population towards the upper class with the vast majority of the population in the lower classes. (Phillips, 2013) Rather than oversimplifying the economic growth rate over the entire country, an analysis of the growth rate/level of income for each household at the median or mode level - the mean would be unreliable due to the skew in distribution - would prove to be a far better