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).

From a global perspective, 19 out of the 20 countries that top the SDG Index are European countries (Sachs et al., 2024). Interestingly, European citizens also report high levels of subjective well-being as emphasized in the World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al., 2024).

Yet, these results are uneven across European countries and many dimensions of sustainable development have not shown significant progress since 2015, and even more so since 2020. There are also significant uncertainties about future SDG trends in Europe, considering the demographic, economic, technological and geopolitical challenges that lie ahead, as also described in the Draghi report.

The EU also generates large negative spillovers, notably via unsustainable consumption and exports, which must be addressed through collective global action. On average, the SDG Index score of the EU is equivalent this year to 72.8 percent. On average the pace of SDG progress in the EU over the period 2020-2023 was more than two times lower (+0.8 points) than over the period 2016-2019 (+1.9 points). In fact, in some of the most advanced European regions, including Western Europe and Northern Europe, SDG performance has slightly declined since 2020 driven notably by declining trends in socio-economic goals.

The 2025 SDG Index for Europe is topped by Northern European countries. Finland ranks first for the fifth year in a row, followed by Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Norway. Yet the SDG dashboards show that even these countries face major challenges (red dashboard rating) in achieving at least two goals.

Building on this year’s dashboards and previous editions, we underline five major SDG challenges faced by the EU:

1. Stagnation and even reversal of progress on Leave-No-One-Behind indicators since 2020, measuring within-country inequalities in opportunities, well-being and equity in access to and quality of services.

2. Persisting challenges related to environmental and biodiversity goals, including sustainable food and land systems (SDG 2, SDGs 12–15). Alongside the launch of this year’s ESDR2025 a companion study prepared by the SDSN and EESC launched the same day discusses challenges and opportunities for achieving SDG2 (Zero Hunger) and sustainable food and land systems in the EU (Lafortune et al, 2025). The study builds on other processes and studies, including the outcome of the Strategic Dialogue on the future of EU Agriculture.

3. Negative impacts from unsustainable consumption and supply chains via international spillover effects.

4. Large gaps and a slow pace of convergence in SDG outcomes across European countries, including on SDG9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure).

5. Slow progress and even reversal in progress on some indicators under SDG16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and SDG17 (Partnerships for the Goals).

Note: Due to missing data several Candidate countries could not be included in this year’s Europe SDG Index rankings including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Montenegro, and Ukraine. However, detailed country profiles and dashboards are made available for these countries in this data visualization

Source: Authors’ calculations

Note: These focus on structural trends since 2015 and may not reflect short-term year-on-year trends.

Source: Authors’ calculations

The SDGs call for addressing inequalities within andacross countries. The “leave no one behind” principle, which is incorporated into the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, is commonly invoked in reference to inequalities within each country. SDG 10 (Reduced inequalities) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the goals) also call for reducing inequalities across countries, and for increased partnerships. In Europe and by EU leadership, this is generally referred to as “convergence”. The European Commission has announced its intention to come up in 2025 with a new action plan on implementing the European Pillar of Social Rights.

To measure inequalities within countries, including their evolution over time, SDSN has developed a “leave-no-one-behind”—or LNOB—index for European countries (Box 2.1). From a global perspective, the EU is among the most equal regions in the world, offering the most advanced social protection systems and universal access to basic services (Sachs, Lafortune and Fuller, 2024). The LNOB Index for Europe aims to capture persisting gaps and differences across European countries and to identify areas where policymakers must remain vigilant. This year’s edition of the LNOB Index for Europe includes a new indicator on the disability employment gap.

The full list of LNOB indicators is available online. The SDSN, working closely with many partners, has also documented throughout the years territorial gaps in SDG implementation and challenges faced by regional and local leaders to finance and implement the SDGs (Box 2.2).

Northern European countries obtain the highest scores on the 2025 LNOB Index (Figure 2.4). Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden are at the top of the index, mainly driven by low levels of income inequality and material deprivation in these countries. On the other hand, there are persisting within-country inequalities are seen in the Baltic States and Central and Eastern European countries, which appear at the bottom of the 2025 LNOB Index. EU candidate countries face many difficulties in catching up with EU member states on measures of LNOB, primarily due to their much higher rates of material deprivation and poverty.

The trend on the LNOB Index and indicators is concerning. Figure 2.5 shows that on average, since 2020, the EU made progress in one sub-dimension (gender equality), stagnated in two sub-dimensions (income inequality and access to services) and declined in one sub-dimensions (poverty and material deprivation). In fact, the aggregate total LNOB score of Western Europe and Northern Europe has declined on average since 2020, driven by declining trends in the poverty, income inequality and access to services sub-pillars of the LNOB Index. The trend for individual indicators, such as the housing cost overburden rate, suggest that households in Europe tend to face growing challenges related to affordable housing and energy as underlined also in other studies (EPC, 2024) (Figure 2.6).

Source: Authors

Source: Authors’ calculations based on EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)

Our results suggest limited convergence by EU candidate countries regarding the achievement of LNOB principles and outcomes. Yet, the positive trend on gender equality must be emphasized, although these efforts must be continued by the new leadership of the EU since no European country has fully achieved yet SDG5 (Gender Equality). The 2030 Agenda and the SDGs make several references to the need to address inequalities faced by people with disabilities. Using the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) compiled by Eurostat, this year’s edition underlines persisting gaps across European countries in terms of disability-related labour market inequalities (Figure 2.7).

Source: Authors’ calculations based on EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)

Finally, some convergence in SDG performance can be observed over the period 2015-2023, yet our results suggest that the pace of convergence remains rather slow. Countries that started in 2015 with lower baseline SDG Index scores did on average progress faster than countries that started at higher baselines (Figure 2.8). At the same time, a simple linear extrapolation suggests that it will take Southern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Baltic States and Candidate countries respectively 19, 23, 27 and 66 years to catch-up with the average performance of Northern Europe on sustainable development (Figure 2.9).

Source: Authors

Note: Based on a linear extrapolation of annual growth rates over the period 2015-2023.

Source: Authors

Most fundamentally, peace, good governance and international cooperation underpin the achievement of the SDGs in Europe and globally. These are captured under SDG16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and SDG17 (Partnerships for the Goals). War and conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world, are humanitarian disasters, major distractions for the sustainable development agenda but also lead or may lead to negative budget trade-offs which affect the ability of developed and developing countries to achieve the SDGs.

As such the European Council meeting of 19 December 2024 focused exclusively on international affairs: Ukraine and the EU in the World. Fifty years after the first ever European Council meeting, the conclusions and follow-up remarks by President António Costa emphasized notably the long tradition of the EU in promoting “unity in diversity” and a “culture of compromise and solidarity” (European Council, 2024).

In 2024, the global community adopted by consensus the “Pact for the Future” which calls for deeper global cooperation:

Global challenges require global solutions. As emphasized in theSustainable Development Report 2024, no nation can solve the global climate crisis on its own. No nation can make a low-cost energy transition on its own. No nation can ensure peace and security on its own. No nation by itself can protect the vital ecosystems or avoid the potential dangers and pitfalls of runaway technologies, be they advanced biotechnologies that can create new pathogens, or artificial intelligence systems that can create fake news or provocations to war.

Nation-states, which remain at the heart of the multilateral system, must be held accountable for upholding the values and principles of the UN Charter. Published in SDSN’s SDR 2024, the Index of Countries’ Support for UN-Based Multilateralism (UN-Mi) precisely aims to fill this knowledge gap by providing the first measure of countries’ commitments to UN-based multilateralism and the UN Charter focusing on six headline indicators (ratification of major UN treaties, UNGA votes aligned with the majority vote at UNGA, membership in UN organizations, use of unilateral coercive measures, peace and demilitarization and financing the UN system and solidarity). The indicators, methodology and results are described at length in a dedicated academic paper (Lafortune & Sachs, 2024).

Specifically, global cooperation to reform the GFA is particularly critical so that more countries can have the fiscal space to invest in the infrastructure and human capital needed to achieve the SDGs. A European country—Spain—will host the 4^th FFD Conference in June 2025. Alongside increased geopolitical tensions, the lack of fiscal space is the major barrier to SDG progress at the global level (Sachs et al, 2023). Promoting an ambitious reform of the GFA is critical, to make sure that a growing share of the approximately $30 trillion USD of global savings supports investments in sustainable development in developed and developing countries alike.

As part of this reform, increasing the levels and effectiveness of Official Development Assistance (ODA) is also critical, at least as a temporary instrument, to safeguard livelihoods and allow poor, fragile and vulnerable countries to escape the poverty trap. Yet, pressures to increase defence expenditure and, in some European countries, to significantly accelerate fiscal consolidation efforts in the next 2-3 years may lead to budget trade-offs and potentially to significant cuts in ODA spending in the coming years, with negative impacts on vulnerable populations and more broadly on efforts to achieve the SDGs globally.

Finally, partnerships are also needed within countries with civil society information and as such freedom of speech and expression is a paramount objective of the SDGs covered under SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). The war in Ukraine and other geopolitical tensions were associated with a decline in Europe and in other parts of the world of the Press Freedom Index as measured by Reporters Sans Frontières (Figure 2.10).Strengthening freedom of speech and the rule of law more generally is, rightfully so, a central priority of the new leadership of the EU.

Source: Authors’ calculations, based on Reporters sans Frontières (2024)

The climate and biodiversity crises are driven by domestic action, but they are also impacted by activities that extend beyond national borders: through trade and other cross-border activities. In addition to environmental spillovers, which are driven by international trade and domestic policies, countries also generate economic, financial, social, and security spillovers.

Over the past decade, the SDSN has pioneered numerous initiatives to measure and to curb negative international spillovers, notably those embodied into unsustainable supply chains. Our analyses also build on the excellent work done by other organizations and thought leaders to track the negative impacts generated by the export of toxic pesticides, conventional weapons, unfair tax competition and tax havens among others (Gaberell et al., 2020; SIPRI, 2024; Tax Justice Network, 2024; Tørsløv et al., 2022). The SDSN has advised European governments and institutions (including France, Germany and Eurostat), developed the first dedicated instrument to track a diverse set of negative imported impacts on the global commons (Lafortune et al, 2021; Ishii et al., 2023) and contributed to numerous sectoral studies to strengthen the governance of specific supply chains including textiles (Malik et al., 2021), minerals (Malik et al., 2024) and food (Malik et al., 2023), and policy studies including for instance a recent study on spillovers issued in the context of the Brazil T20 process (Berger et al., 2024).

Compared with other world regions, the EU—and OECD countries in general – tends to generate relatively large negative spillover effects (Figure 2.11). These are driven primarily by unsustainable supply chains, which lead to deforestation and other negative environmental and social impacts, serving the consumption needs of EU and OECD countries. Box 2.3 provides further details about the Spillover Index. Figures 2.12 & 2.13 from the Global Commons Stewardship Index (GCSi) suggests that these negative impacts can represent 20-30% of the total footprint and sometimes even more.

Source: Authors’ calculations

Source: Ishii et al., 2024. Global Commons Stewardship Index 2024.

Source: Ishii et al., 2024. Global Commons Stewardship Index 2024.

Building on SDSN’s work, but also the pioneering work done by Yale University, the Remaking Trade Project—including the Villars Framework for a Sustainable Global Trade System – and the global leadership of the Center for the Global Commons at the University of Tokyo, the GCSi 2024 was published in March 2024 in Switzerland argued the following:

The 2024 GCSi report identifies five major priorities for action. One of them focuses on the importance of strengthening the international trade system—covering the World Trade Organization (WTO), UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the International Trade Center (ITC) – so that it “fulfills thesustainable development mandate in the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement”.

The EU’s unilateral measures that aim to address carbon leakage and other imported negative impacts, more specifically the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), are conceptually correct and pricing carbon is an important policy lever for climate mitigation (Baranzini et al, 2017; Boyce, 2018). Such policies may help create a level-playing field and encourage other countries to adopt more ambitious climate regulations. Yet, the CBAM largely reflects the EU’s approach to monitoring and curbing carbon emissions. In a context of rising trade tensions, driven to some extent by the United States’ stated intention to increase unilaterally and significantly tariffs, the EU should pursue its efforts to make its trade policies compatible with global frameworks and forge new strategic global alliances.

In this context, the CBAM might benefit from further discussions at the international level and with major partner countries including for instance on standards applied to measure and monitor carbon emissions, on how subnational carbon pricing schemes might be considered but also how the revenues of the CBAM could potentially be leveraged to address concerns in developing countries related to the fairness, equity and distributional impacts of the CBAM.

In general, the EU and the international community at large should pursue their efforts to also advance global mechanisms, including carbon pricing and pricing natural capital. The reform of the global trade system must go and-in-hand with accelerated efforts to expand access to low-carbon and digital technologies and unlock private and public capital in developing countries to invest in more sustainable production systems.