2030 Agenda and national statistical offices

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Figure 1: Logo of the SDGs
Figure 1: Logo of the SDGs

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a global United Nations action plan for the planet, people and their prosperity adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015. The 2030 Agenda, developed by the Member States of the United Nations, is a roadmap for “Transforming our world for the better“, aimed at achieiving a sustainable transformation in social, economic and environmental terms by 2030. It comprises 17 global goals that are subdivided into 169 targets with over 240 indicators. The goals are called Sustainable Development Goals and are abbreviated as SDGs (Fig. 1).

Monitoring goal achievement

The United Nations Statistical Commission was mandated to develop global indicators for the targets together with the national statistical offices. The Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) established for this purpose presented a set of indicators and has continuously refined it. The IAEG-SDGs is composed of statistical offices of some Member States of the United Nations, including the Federal Statistical Office representing Germany.

National reporting on sustainable development in Germany

The Federal Statistical Office is responsible for coordinating and publishing national SGD indicator data for Germany and for statistical reporting on Germany’s progress in this field.

In July 2019, the Federal Statistical Office launched this online platform on the indicators of the UN global Sustainable Development Goals. Here time series and associated metadata regarding global sustainable development are provided in a processed and interactive form for Germany. The SDGs section of the online platform enables the competent international organisations (custodian agencies) to directly download Germany’s SDG indicator data and use them, for example, for global reporting assignments.