Eurostat: How has the EU progressed towards the Sustainable Development Goals?

Sustainable development aims to achieve a continuous improvement in citizens’ quality of life and well-being. This involves the pursuit of economic progress, while safeguarding the natural environment and promoting social justice. For these reasons, sustainable development is a fundamental and overarching objective of the European Union. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, have given a new impetus to global efforts for achieving sustainable development. The EU is committed to playing an active role to maximise progress towards the SDGs, as outlined in its Communication ‘Next steps for a sustainable European future‘. In this context, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, issues today the publication ‘Sustainable development in the European Union – 2017 monitoring report of the progress towards the SDGs in an EU context‘. It provides a first statistical overview of trends relating to the SDGs in the EU. This publication is accompanied by a short brochure, also released today, providing a visual summary of the main findings of the full report. As of today, Eurostat’s website hosts a renewed dedicated section on measuring sustainable development in the EU and presents the results of the monitoring report in a series of Statistics Explained articles. A press release is available here.