The Sustainable Development Report 2025
The Sustainable Development Report (SDR) reviews progress made each year on the SDGs since their adoption by all UN Member States in 2015. Ahead of the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (Ff4D) in Seville, Spain, this 10th anniversary edition of the SDR outlines urgent reforms to the Global Financial Architecture (GFA) and includes for the first time an assessment of which countries have most progressed on the SDGs.
Substantial differences in rankings may be due to small differences in aggregate SDG Index scores. This calls for caution when interpreting differences in rankings between countries. Differences of two or three positions between countries should not be interpreted as "significant", whereas differences of 10 places may be ascribed to meaningful differences in performance. For further details, see the statistical audit by Papadimitriou et al. (2019) conducted on behalf of the EU Joint Research Centre (JRC).
The SDG Dashboards provide a visual representation of countries' performance on the 17 SDGs. The "traffic light" color scheme (green, yellow, orange, and red) illustrates how far a country is from achieving a particular goal. The SDG Dashboards are presented for all UN member states, including countries not included in the SDG Index. As in previous years, the SDG Dashboards and country profiles for OECD countries include additional metrics that are not available for non-OECD member states.
The SDG Trend Dashboards indicate whether a country is on track to achieve each individual goal by 2030, based on past performance. It builds on annual growth rates since 2015, extrapolated to 2030. Indicator trends are aggregated at the goal level to give an indication of how the country is progressing towards that SDG.
For the first time, the 2025 report presents an evaluation of which countries have progressed the most on the SDGs since their adoption in 2015. To measure their progress, we created a simplified version of the SDG Index (SDGi) using a headline set of indicators to reduce missing-data bias in the time-series data. The SDGi was then used to calculate the change in overall score, in percentage points, for all countries with sufficient data.
As last year, we also present an overview of where the world stands on SDG progress, calculated using a population-weighted average for all UN member states. Unless specified otherwise, all regional average results presented in the report are population-weighted.