ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS: DO THEY GO HAND IN HAND OR BACK TO BACK? A ZOOM INTO SDG7

The Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) aims to ensure affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Based on the United Nations indicator list, the European Union has established its own indicator set. This paper focuses on those referring to energy affordability (the share of people not able to keep their homes adequately warm), reliability (energy dependency rate) and sustainability (the share of renewables on final energy consumption) to pursuit two objectives: first, to compute Energy Affordability Ratios (from microdata) as a supplementary indicator to evaluate the affordability of energy services; second, to explore potential synergies and trade-offs emerging from the accomplishment of the SDG in these three dimensions. Considering a sample of 23 European countries, we concluded that affordability of energy services has not been fully attained yet. Also, we found a significant number of synergies between these dimensions of SDG7, suggesting that several countries are in a consistent pathway to achieve this SDG.