The EU’s Support for the Global Sustainable Development Agenda: How to Accelerate Progress Until 2030

The current global polycrisis – characterised by wars, geopolitical tensions, pandemics, environmental degradation, climate change, inequality, and social injustice – has exposed the challenges faced by the world community in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). First, it highlights the interconnected causes of multiple crises and the need to move away from siloed thinking and towards more integrated, sustainability-oriented policymaking across topics, sectors and social systems. Secondly, despite the large number of goals and targets, today’s crises show that the SDG framework is incomplete and fails to sufficiently capture several key dimensions of human wellbeing, such as social cohesion, mental health, or digital sovereignty. Thirdly, the slow progress and setbacks experienced in realising the Agenda reveal wavering government commitment to the SDGs through, for instance, insufficient financing and regulatory measures to tackle harmful externalities, often referred to as negative spillovers. At present, only 16% of the SDG targets are projected to be reached by 2030 (Sachs et al., 2024).