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Executive Summary

Since 2016, the Sustainable Development Report (SDR) has provided the most up-to-date assessment of progress towards the SDGs. This year’s SDR emphasizes five key messages to support SDG implementation and global cooperation for sustainable development within the UN framework. These messages are especially important as the SDGs enter the homestretch and UN member states consider the sustainable development agenda beyond 2030 to mid-century, including at the SDG Summit in September 2027.

Part 1: From Goals to Means: The Path to SDG Implementation

The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by all 193 member states of the United Nations on 25 September 2015 as an agenda of unprecedented ambition (UNGA 2015). Grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the rights-based aspirations of the UN Charter, the SDGs constitute the most comprehensive moral and political commitment the international community has ever made – to end extreme poverty, ensure quality education, secure good health, achieve gender equality, decarbonize energy systems, protect oceans and forests, build sustainable cities, and make peace within and among nations.

Part 2: The SDG Index and Dashboards

The SDG Index and Dashboards provide an annual assessment of SDG progress covering all 193 UN member states. The SDG Index score is presented on a scale of 0 to 100 and can be interpreted as a percentage towards optimal performance on the SDGs. While all 193 UN member states have a country profile, some countries are not ranked due to missing data. This year, a total of169 countries are ranked in the SDG Index, including two new countries not previously ranked: Eritrea and TimorLeste. This year’s SDG Index incorporates 123 indicators, including 101 global indicators and 22 additional indicators used for the OECD countries’ dashboards. A new indicator from the FAO, on progress towards productive and sustainable agriculture, was added to track progress on SDG 2 (No Hunger). Additional changes in the indicators used are described in the methods section (see Methodology).

Part 3: Countries’ Support for UN-Based Multilateralism

In September 2027, world leaders will gather for the final SDG Summit before the Agenda 2030 deadline – an event that the 2024 Pact for the Future explicitly frames as an opportunity to “advance sustainable development by 2030 and beyond” (Action 12.b). The period leading up to the Summit is therefore pivotal for rethinking global cooperation for sustainable development, and for advancing the reforms needed to equip the UN system with the vision, methods, tools and financing required to address twenty-first-century global challenges, including climate change, collective security and the impact of new technologies.

Part 4: Government Efforts to Implement the SDGs

The SDGs represent a very complex challenge for governments. Their implementation requires long-term policy and investment frameworks as well as new approaches that cut across traditional government silos. In 2019, the SDSN introduced the six “SDG Transformations”, which provide a more operational framework for addressing the systemic and integrated nature of the SDGs (Sachs et al. 2029). That same year, the SDSN worked with the OECD on a flagship study, released at the High-Level Political Forum, that examined long-term pathways and the governance implications of the SDGs (SDSN and OECD 2019). Over the years, the SDSN has worked bilaterally with multiple national and regional governments to strengthen governance systems for the SDGs. The SDSN also regularly collects data from its global network of academics and researchers, to track the evolution of the SDG policy landscape worldwide.

Methodology

The Sustainable Development Report 2026 (SDR26) provides an assessment of progress towards the SDGs for all UN member states. The SDG Index score is presented on a scale of 0 to 100 and can be interpreted as a percentage towards optimal performance on the SDGs. Therefore, the difference between 100 and a country’s SDG Index score is the distance, in percentage points, that must be overcome to reach optimum SDG performance. The same basket of indicators and similar performance thresholds are used for all countries to generate comparable scores and rankings.