Read the Report

Part 1: The new EU leadership (2024-2029) and the SDGs

In a context where the new EU leadership – European Commission, Parliament and Council of the EU—has recently been established for the period 2024-2029, this sixth edition of the European Sustainable Development Report (ESDR) presents an updated narrative report and database to support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 2030 Agenda in Europe.

Part 2: Performance of the EU and European countries on the SDGs in 2025

The 2025 edition of the SDG Index and Dashboards for the EU, European member states and partner countries builds on the global SDG Index methodology. This year’s edition covers 41 countries (Table 1). This methodology was peer-reviewed by Nature Geoscience and Cambridge University Press, and the 2019 global edition was statistically audited by the European Commission Joint Research Centre. In 2021, the SDG Index was listed by the European Parliament research service among the ten composite indices useful for policymaking (European Parliament, 2021).

Part 3: Outlook

We reiterate our call for a “European Deal for the Future” which should be green, social and international. The implementation of the SDGs in the EU over the period 2024-2029 must include four overarching priorities: (1) collectively, scale up investments in clean energy and digital technologies in the EU now and lay the foundations for an ambitious investment strategy well into the next decade via an ambitious Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2035; (2) strengthen pro-social measures to address the EU’s stagnation on the “Leave no one behind” principle of the SDGs, the social consequences of inflation, rising budget pressures and rising geopolitical tensions; (3) address the negative health and environmental impacts from unsustainable consumption, by prioritising notably the just transition toward healthier and more sustainable diets, and finally (4) harness SDG/Green Deal Diplomacy with all regions, uphold the principles established in the UN Charter and support an ambitious reform of the GFA, including at the forthcoming FFD4 Conference in Sevilla, Spain in June 2025.

Methodology

The Europe Sustainable Development Report 2025 provides a quantitative assessment of SDG priorities for the EU, EFTA countries, the UK and candidate countries. The report builds on the methodology of the Sustainable Development Report, developed by the SDSN and Bertelsmann Stiftung to track countries’ performance on the 17 SDGs. The methodology has been peer-reviewed (Schmidt-Traub et al., 2017) and statistically audited—via the 2019 global edition—by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (Papadimitriou et al., 2019b). The SDG Index has been listed among the ten composite indices useful for policymaking by the European Parliamentary Research Service (European Parliament, 2021).