Summary

The present report on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals is submitted in response to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (General Assembly resolution 70/1).

As the first cycle of the implementation and review of the Sustainable Development Goals comes to a close and Member States prepare for the high-level political forum in July and five major meetings focused on sustainable development to be held in September, this “special edition” of the progress report on the Goals was written in cooperation with the United Nations System Task Team on the High-level Political Forum, co-chaired by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the Secretariat and the United Nations Development Programme.

The report demonstrates that over the past four years, progress has been made with regard to a number of Sustainable Development Goals and their targets, and a number of actions have been undertaken by Governments and other stakeholders to respond to the 2030 Agenda more broadly.

The report also demonstrates, however, that progress has been slow on many Sustainable Development Goals, that the most vulnerable people and countries continue to suffer the most and that the global response thus far has not been ambitious enough.

With the next decade of implementation in mind, the present report identifies a series of cross-cutting areas where political leadership and urgent, scalable multi-stakeholder action are needed to dramatically accelerate progress. Doing so will allow the United Nations to shift the world onto a trajectory that is compatible with the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.