You could spend a lot of time going through any one sprawling UN report like the Human Development Index Report. Then you could spend a lifetime digging into the underlying sources. Here are a few things I gleaned from a light skim and looking at some of the pictures:

• Amartya Sen says the index was designed as an alternative to be looked at alongside GDP, and the intent is to identify shortcomings of GDP, draw attention using a single aggregate number which doesn’t really mean much, and then hope news media and individuals dig into the underlying information. He thinks this has been reasonably successful.
• The index crashed in 2020 due to Covid-19.
• They have made a significant effort to incorporate ecological risks into the index. There are interesting chapters on planetary boundaries and relationships between the overall level of development and ecological risks across countries. Of course, the countries with higher development levels tend to contribute more to the global risks, which then fall on the countries with lower levels of development. So the goal would be to reduce the impact from the more developed countries, while moving the less developed countries up the development ladder without creating even more risk globally. This is hard to do.
• Chapter 2 summarizes the magnitude of overall human impacts compared to the scale of the planet’s natural systems, the planetary boundaries concept, and the biodiversity collapse. Not a bad introduction if anyone is new to these issues.
• Food security risks have increased significantly, and not just due to Covid-19 but due to flooding, droughts, heat, and natural disasters clearly driven by climate change. There are a lot of intertwined issues out there, but if we were going to pick only one to pay attention to globally, this would be it. See pp. 56-58. Flashing warning lights here!
• There is an essay on existential threats to the species and civilization somewhere towards the back. One way to estimate the risk is to look at how long the species has been around, how long some of our ancestral Homo species were around, and then the annual risk of extinction. Interesting, but I wonder how hard it would be to measure/model progress against this metric or the potential impact of any one action. Even if we don’t go extinct, the category of existential threats includes an unrecoverable collapse of civilization or merely a partial collapse to an “unrecoverable dystopia”. Let’s try to avoid any of these.
• Of course, the UN has to balance all the doom and gloom stuff with an equal word salad of things we could try to do to make it better. There are a lot more facts, figures, and scientific references in the first part, and a lot more anecdotes and case studies in the second part. TLDR, but hopefully there is some stuff in there that could trickle down to actual policies and actions at the national and local level.