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This year’s Sustainable Development Report edition focuses on the financing sustainable goals up to 2030. The report is published ahead of the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), scheduled to take place during 30 June-3 July 2025 in Seville, Spain.
Since 2016, the Sustainable Development Reports (SDR) provided the most up-to-date world-wide data available to track and rank the performance of most of the UN member states on the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. Besides, eighty years after the creation of the UN system, the report also provides improved and updated measures to track countries’ efforts to support UN-based multilateralism.
According to the UN General Secretary, in the “mid-way to 2030, only 15 percent of the SDGs are on track”; besides, the present rates of investment fall far short of what is required to meet the SDGs and developing countries are unable to access sufficient finance on affordable terms. Many states, he adds, are “gripped by ongoing economic turmoil and the situation is aggravated by a global financial system that is short-term oriented, crisis-prone, and which further exacerbates inequalities”.
Source and citation from: https://www.un.org/en/sdg-stimulus
Background
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs and the 10th edition of the Sustainable Development Report, SDR. Prepared by the SDSN’s SDG Transformation Center, the SDR reviews progress made each year on the SDGs since their adoption by the 193 UN member states. This year’s edition focuses on “Financing the SDGs by 2030 and Mid-Century” and is published ahead of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), scheduled to take place from 30 June to 3 July 2025 in Seville, Spain.
The Sustainable Development Report (SDR) reviews progress made each year on the SDGs since their adoption by all UN Member States in 2015. Ahead of the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (Ff4D) in Seville, Spain, this 10th anniversary edition of the SDR outlines urgent reforms to the Global Financial Architecture (GFA) and includes for the first time an assessment of which countries have most progressed on the SDGs.
In total, more than 200,000 individual data points have been used to produce 200+ country and regional SDG profiles. This year’s edition was authored by a group of independent experts at the SDG Transformation Center, an initiative of the SDSN.
The European account
The EU-27 is regularly publishing the European Sustainable Development Reports, which represent a regional assessment of the EU states’ progress towards achieving the UN-2030 SDG. Thus, the report in 2024 complemented the official SDG-indicators and the voluntary national reviews. As in previous years, the 2024-report was based on public consultations and gathered internationally comparable national data.
More in: https://www.integrin.dk/2025/01/06/european-sustainable-development-report-2024-assessment-and-outcomes/
For example, in our Institute’s SDG review in 2023 we noted that “the global SDG-community has acknowledged that “for the third year in a row, global progress on the SDGs has stalled”. The bad news was that the global SDG report-2023 demonstrated that “at the midpoint in the 2030 Agenda none of the 17 SDGs would be achieved”. Besides, there was a risk that the gap in SDG outcomes between high-income countries and low-income countries will be larger in 2030 than when the goals were universally agreed upon in 2015.
Source: https://www.integrin.dk/2023/06/25/global-sustainability-report-2023-new-initiatives-to-accelerate-sdgs/
SDG financing
Progress towards the SDGs depends on significant long-term public and private investments in critical societal transformations, such as energy and transport infrastructure, water and sanitation, health, education, the environmental quality, as well as digital connectivity.
These high-priority SDG-investments have long-lasting economic and social returns far above the cost of capital, the report acknowledges; yet sovereign borrowers in the developing and emerging economies often experience challenging conditions on the financial markets, as they face poor credit ratings, short maturities on debts and disproportionally high borrowing costs.
These issues undermine countries’ ability to finance essential capital needs, and significantly impedes their progress towards sustainable development.
Research undertaken by the SDG Transformation Center and the International Monetary Fund reveals the large financing gap faced by many developing nations.
The report underlines the “global work on SDG financing” and focuses on the following issues:
a) Assessing SDG financing gaps globally and for specific countries, country groups, and regions.
b) Exploring financing pathways and mechanisms – including both traditional and innovative financing tools such as Green/SDG bonds, etc. – to complement domestic resource mobilization in support of the UN SDG Stimulus.
Note on the SDG Stimulus to deliver Agenda 2030: the global economy has faced a series of shocks. The ability of developing countries to invest in sustainable development and climate action is sharply curtailed. The UN Secretary-General has called for SDG Stimulus to provide developing countries with the resources to recover and accelerate progress.
More in: https://www.un.org/en/sdg-stimulus
c) Advocating for reforming the Global Financial Architecture (i.e. criteria for accessing development finance, leverage of the private sector, commercial credit risk ratings, etc.).
d) Supporting countries’ efforts to assess their structural multidimensional vulnerability and resilience, to develop long-term budget frameworks aligned with the SDGs and to improve data quality and collection.
e) Contributing to a global dialogue on alternative measures of progress beyond traditional GDP-approaches.
f) Providing recommendations on fair burden-sharing of financing for human-induced climate adaptation and loss and damage costs.
Source: https://sdgtransformationcenter.org/financing
Eight SDR’s key messages
1- Global commitment to the SDGs is strong: 190 out of 193 countries have presented national action plans for advancing sustainable development. A decade after the adoption of Agenda 30 and the SDGs, 190 of the 193 UN member states have participated in the Voluntary National Review (VNR) process, presenting their SDG implementation plans and sustainable development priorities to the international community.
The European Union and State of Palestine have also presented VNRs; most UN member states have presented two or more VNRs (39 countries volunteered to present one in 2025) and only three UN member states have not taken part in the VNR process: Haiti, Myanmar, and the United States. Additionally, a growing number of regional and local leaders have prepared Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs) to report on SDG implementation at the subnational level: as of March 2025, 249 VLRs were listed on a special UN website.
2- East and South Asia has outperformed all other regions in SDG progress since 2015. This year’s SDR introduces a streamlined SDG Index (so-called, SDGi), which uses 17 headline indicators to track overall SDG progress. On average, East and South Asia has shown the fastest progress on the SDGs since 2015, driven notably by rapid progress on the socioeconomic target.
3- Other world countries that have progressed more rapidly than their peers include the following: Benin (Sub-Saharan Africa), Nepal (East and South Asia), Peru (Latin America and the Caribbean), the United Arab Emirates (Middle East and North Africa), Uzbekistan (Eastern Europe and Central Asia), Costa Rica (OECD), and Saudi Arabia (G20).
4- European countries continue to top the SDG Index; thus, Finland ranks first this year and 19 of the top 20 countries are in Europe. Yet even these countries face significant challenges in achieving at least two goals, including those related to climate and biodiversity. In this year’s SDG Index, China (#49) and India (#99) have entered the top 50 and top 100 performers respectively
5- On the global average, the SDGs are far off-track: among world states, none of the 17 goals are currently on course to be achieved by 2030. Conflicts, structural vulnerabilities, and limited fiscal space impede SDG progress in many parts of the world. But while only 17 percent of the targets are on track to be achieved worldwide, most UN member states have made strong progress on targets related to access to basic services and infrastructure, including mobile broadband use (SDG 9), access to electricity (SDG 7), internet use (SDG 9), under-5 mortality rate (SDG 3), as well as neonatal mortality (SDG 3; neonatal mortality refers to the death of a live-born infant within the first 28 days of life).
6- Barbados ranks first and the United States ranks last in UN-based multilateralism: i.e. Barbados stands out as the country most committed to UN-based multilateralism, while the United States ranks last in this year’s Index of countries’ support for UN-based multilateralism. In early 2025, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization (WHO), and formally declared its opposition to the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda. Among G20 countries, Brazil is the most committed to UN-based multilateralism, with Chile leading among OECD countries
7- For many developing countries, a lack of fiscal space is the major obstacle to SDG progress. Roughly half the world’s population lives in countries that cannot invest adequately in sustainable development due to debt burdens and a lack of access to affordable, long-term capital. Global public goods are vastly under-financed; thus, the UN member states gathering at the expected 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Seville, Spain (June 30-July 3, 2025) would have an enormous responsibility, not only to their own citizens but to all of humanity
8- Sustainable development offers high returns: capital should flow to the emerging and developing countries on more favorable terms, but the Global Financial Architecture, GFA is broken; thus, money flows readily to rich countries and not to the emerging and developing economies (EMDEs) that offer higher growth potential and rates of return. At the top of the agenda at FfD4 is going to be the “need to reform the GFA so that capital flows in far larger sums to the EMDEs”; thus, part 1 of the present report (also published online by the SDSN in May 2025) offers practical recommendations to scale up and align international financing flows to support global public goods and achieve sustainable development.
Global leaders in SDGs
The report shows first ten countries’ position – out of total 167 entities- according to the report’ chosen ranks and scores, with the highest at 100):
1. Finland-87.02; 2. Sweden- 85.74; 3. Denmark -85.26; 4.Germany-83.67; 5. France-83.14;
6. Austria-83.01; 7. Norway -82.72; 8. Croatia-82.39; 9. Poland-82.08; and 10. Czechia-81.94.
General source and citation for the report: Sachs, J.D., Lafortune, G., Fuller, G., Iablonovski, G. (2025). Financing Sustainable Development to 2030 and Mid-Century. Sustainable Development Report 2025. Paris: SDSN, Dublin: Dublin University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25546/111909.
On Sustainable Development Solutions Network, SDSN
The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) has been operating since 2012 under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General. SDSN mobilizes global scientific and technological expertise to promote practical solutions for sustainable development, including the implementation of the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement.
In September 2024, at the UN Summit of the Future, the UN member states reaffirmed their commitment to the SDGs and effective multilateralism, adopting by consensus the Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact and Declaration on Future Generations.
Interesting enough, that despite current geopolitical tensions, the survey data collected by UNDP reveals that an overwhelming majority of people globally (86 percent) believe that countries “should work together on climate change even if they disagree on other issues, such as
trade or security”.
Source, the UNDP Report-2024 in: https://annualreport.undp.org/; and in: UNDP. 2024. Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024. https://www.undp.org/publications/peoples-climate-vote-2024.
Conclusion
The SDR-2025 provides an overview of countries’ support for the SDGs and UN-based multilateralism: i.e. it underlines the overwhelming intention of most nation-states to support the UN-based multilateralism, while also addressing some cases with a declining support among a
small group of powerful and influential UN member states, the cases that undermine the effective functioning of the whole UN system on SDGs.
The report underlines that all countries should capitalize on the momentum of upcoming international conferences and summits: e.g. including the FfD4 in Spain, the 80th UN General Assembly, COP 30 in Brazil, as well as the UN World Social Summit (all events in 2025), as well as in 2027 the next SDG Summit at Heads-of-State level – to recommit the strengthening UN-based multilateralism and global partnerships, as emphasized by SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), and accelerating actions to achieve the SDGs by 2030 and mid-century.