Sustainable Development Goals

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sustainable Development Goals were born from a simple and staggering ambition: to end poverty in all its forms, everywhere, by 2030. On the 25th of September 2015, 193 countries gathered at the United Nations General Assembly and agreed to a document that runs 92 paragraphs. That document, titled "Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," contained 17 goals, 169 targets, and a pledge that would shape global policy for the following decade and beyond.

  The pledge at the heart of the agenda is called Leave No One Behind. It asks governments to reach the people and countries furthest behind first. It sounds straightforward. But by 2025, the United Nations Secretary-General was urging the world to "act decisively and act now," because the goals were slipping from reach.

  Why has an agenda adopted by every member of the United Nations struggled to move the needle? Who counts the progress, who pays the bills, and what happens when the goals themselves pull in opposite directions? The answers reach from a 1983 United Nations commission to a film festival held each September in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

• 2. Roots in Rio

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  In 1983, the United Nations created a body that would eventually shape everything the SDGs became. The World Commission on Environment and Development, later known as the Brundtland Commission, defined sustainable development as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." That definition still underpins the 17 goals today.

  Nearly a decade after that commission was formed, in 1992, the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro. There, delegates developed and adopted Agenda 21, the first international framework linking environment and development. It was the conceptual ancestor of what would follow.

  The direct lineage of the SDGs began in July 2011, when Colombia proposed the idea of the goals at a preparatory event for a follow-up conference, held in Indonesia. In September of that same year, the United Nations Department of Public Information 64th NGO Conference in Bonn, Germany, took up the idea. The Rio+20 conference in 2012 produced a resolution called "The Future We Want," and by January 2013, a 30-member Open Working Group had been established to define the goals specifically.

  That group submitted a proposal of 8 goals and 169 targets to the 68th session of the General Assembly in September 2014. On the 5th of December 2014, the General Assembly accepted the Secretary-General's Synthesis Report, cementing the OWG proposals as the foundation for the final agenda. Unlike the earlier Millennium Development Goals, which applied only to developing nations from 2000 to 2015, the SDGs were designed to apply to every country on Earth.

• 3. Seventeen Goals, One Pledge

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  Paragraph 59 of the 2030 Agenda lists the 17 goals in full, ranging from No Poverty and Zero Hunger through Climate Action, Life Below Water, and Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. Goal 17, Partnerships for the Goals, is the only one devoted entirely to the question of how all the others are to be achieved.

  Underneath each goal sits a detailed architecture. As of July 2017, when a UN General Assembly resolution made the framework fully actionable, there were 169 targets and 232 indicators. Each goal typically carries eight to 12 targets, and each target is measured by an average of 1.5 indicators. By 2025, the total number of official indicators in use stood at 234.

  The targets divide into two categories: outcome targets, which describe circumstances to be achieved and carry numerical labels, and means of implementation targets, which address how those outcomes are to be reached and carry letter labels. In SDG 6 on clean water and sanitation, for example, Targets 6.1 to 6.6 are outcome targets, while Targets 6.a and 6.b address the means of achieving them.

  The indicator selection process was entrusted to the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators, known as the IAEG-SDGs, whose members met behind closed doors after the goals and targets were already set. Scholars have since pointed out that the process was never free from political influence; statisticians received instructions from their governments, and the interests of powerful governments shaped which measures ended up in the framework. The 51st session of the UN Statistical Commission, held in New York City from the 3rd to the 6th of March 2020, reviewed 36 proposed changes to the global indicator framework.

• 4. The Price of the Promise

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  In 2014, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimated the annual cost of achieving the global goals at US$2.5 trillion per year. A later estimate, from 2018 by the Basel Institute of Commons and Economics, placed the range between US$2.5 and $5.0 trillion per year.

  For Africa alone, factoring in the continent's population growth, the United Nations calculated that yearly funding of $1.3 trillion would be needed. A narrower estimate from the International Monetary Fund put the cost of climate adaptation alone at $50 billion. Providing clean water and sanitation for the entire global population has been estimated at as high as US$200 billion.

  For developing countries, a cost estimate from 2020 placed the financing gap at US$2.5 trillion per year before the COVID-19 pandemic, a figure that was projected to rise to US$4.2 trillion in 2020 alone. Indonesia's own SDG financing gap was estimated in 2021 at US$4.7 trillion. Yet that same study described the SDGs as an investable proposition, calculating the financial value of business opportunities at US$12 trillion per year in just four sectors: food, cities, energy and materials, and health and well-being.

  In 2017, the Rockefeller Foundation argued that the key lay in mobilizing a greater share of what it described as US$200 trillion or more in annual private capital investment flows. A meta-analysis published in 2022, however, found scant evidence that governments have substantially reallocated funding toward the SDGs, either at home or through international cooperation. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development in 2015, and the Secretary-General's Strategy for Financing the 2030 Agenda in 2018, have tried to change that picture, but national budgets have proven difficult to realign.

• 5. Goals in Conflict

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  Ending hunger and protecting forests seem like natural allies. In practice they pull against each other, and that tension runs through the entire SDG framework. Scholars have identified three particularly difficult trade-offs: reconciling SDG targets 2.3 and 15.2, which pit food security against sustainable forest management; reconciling targets 9.2 and 9.4, which balance economic growth with environmental sustainability; and reconciling targets 10.1 and 8.1, which weigh income equality against economic growth.

  SDG 8 calls for continued global economic growth of 3 percent. Scientists have noted that this rate may not be reconcilable with ecological sustainability goals, because the required rate of absolute global eco-economic decoupling is far higher than any country has achieved. The SDGs include three environment-focused goals, numbers 13, 14, and 15, covering climate, oceans, and land, but there is no overarching environmental or planetary goal in the framework.

  The IPCC has identified robust synergies running in the other direction for SDG 13 on climate action, connecting it positively with SDG 3 on health, SDG 7 on clean energy, SDG 11 on sustainable cities, SDG 12 on responsible consumption, and SDG 14 on oceans. Those synergies represent the constructive side of the interconnections. A 2015 commentary in The Economist described the 169 targets as sprawling, misconceived, and a mess, contrasting them with the eight Millennium Development Goals that preceded them.

  Research published in 2022 went further, concluding that the SDGs might actually have adverse effects by providing what it called a "smokescreen of hectic political activity" that blurs a reality of stagnation. GDP, meanwhile, underpins 17 indicators used to measure progress toward 9 goals and 15 targets, despite most of those goals and targets making no mention of GDP in their own language.

• 6. Who Falls Behind

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  A study published in 2024 examined 77 voluntary national reviews to find out which populations were most often identified as furthest behind. People with disabilities topped the list, named in more than 70 percent of the reviews. Women and girls followed at more than 60 percent, then youth at roughly 50 percent, the elderly at 45 percent, children at more than 40 percent, and refugees and migrants at roughly 30 percent.

  Of the 17 goals, SDG 10 on reduced inequalities is among the least supported. Global and domestic inequality barely made it into the final set of goals at all, and as of 2023, inequality was actually widening according to many indicators. A content analysis of voluntary national reviews from 19 countries, conducted in 2020, found that SDGs 1 and 8, on poverty eradication and economic growth, were by far the most widely prioritized by national governments.

  In Asia, the COVID-19 pandemic deepened existing setbacks. The pandemic, which lasted from 2020 to 2023, was described at the UN High-level Political Forum in July 2023 as "the worst human and economic crisis in a lifetime." It threatened progress particularly on SDG 3 covering health, SDG 4 on education, SDG 6 on water and sanitation, SDG 10 on reduced inequality, and SDG 17 on partnerships. Data showed losses of progress on goals 2, 8, 10, 11, and 15 specifically in Asia.

  A 2024 study used machine learning models to forecast SDG scores by region for 2030. OECD countries were expected to reach a score of 80 with a 2.8 percent change, while Sub-Saharan Africa was forecast to score 56 with the largest proportional change at 7.2 percent, underscoring how much further the furthest-behind regions still have to travel.

• 7. The Politics of Measurement

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  In 2022, a systematic meta-analysis reviewed more than 3,000 scientific articles, mainly from the social sciences, to assess the political impact of the SDGs. The project defined transformative impact as the presence of all three types of steering effects across a political system: discursive, normative, and institutional. Its finding was that the SDGs have had only limited transformative political impact.

  Discursive effects, such as the uptake of the principle of leaving no one behind in policy speeches, have occurred. Normative and institutional effects, meaning actual changes to laws, regulatory frameworks, or the creation of dedicated agencies, have been far rarer. Countries tend to prioritize the socioeconomic goals, SDGs 8 to 12, over the environmentally oriented ones, SDGs 13 to 15, in line with national development priorities that long predate the 2030 Agenda.

  The High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which monitors the goals, has been hampered by a lack of political leadership and divergent national interests. It functions mainly as a platform for voluntary reporting rather than a mechanism that can drive system-wide change.

  Public communication was never formally built into the 2030 Agenda's authority. An independent campaign called Project Everyone, backed by corporate institutions and international organizations, developed icons for each goal and shortened the branding to Global Goals. The Aarhus Convention, passed in 2001, has since addressed information transparency and youth engagement in environmental decision-making as related issues.

  In 2019 and again in 2021, Secretary-General António Guterres appointed 17 SDG advocates, public figures tasked with raising awareness and pushing for faster action. The co-chairs were Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, and Justin Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada. Global Goals Week, an annual September event first held in 2016, brings together more than 100 partner organizations and often runs concurrently with Climate Week NYC in the same month.