Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is a keyword in today’s lives of the common people, as well as the headache of policymakers all around the world. Maintaining good levels of sustainable development is the prime target of countries today. Having a list of indicators in computing the sustainable development index (SDI), the countries are now thinking of other indicators, such as the inclusion of the energy indicator in its computations. The present study aims to analyse the trends in all the SDG indicators, the set of development indicators, and the set of environmental indicators in BRICS nations. It then aims to go through the phase-wise analysis centering on the global financial crisis in 2008, on the changes in all the indicators across the countries. Finally, it examines the causal factors responsible for the trends in the SDI scores of the countries. It also used the ‘energy factor’ to see the changes in the SDI scores of the countries. The results show that the SDI scores are rising for all except China. The main factor behind the falling trends in SDI for China is the rising environmental indicators, which pull down the values of the SDI score. Regarding causality analysis, the Granger causality test results show many instances where both the economic and environmental indicators have made a causal influence on the SDI scores for South Africa, with some lesser instances in the case of Brazil, Russia, and India. Using the energy factor, the SDI scores have gone down, but the directions of causality remain unchanged.