Sustainable development indicators

The EU Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS) sets out the objective of achieving improvement of the quality of life for present and future generations. Prosperity, environmental protection and social cohesion are to be achieved through sustainable communities which are able to manage resources efficiently and to tap into the ecological and social innovation potential of the economy.

 

Evaluating progress towards the agreed goals is an integral part of the SDS. Therefore, the EU Commission constantly develops and improves Sustainable Development Indicators (SDIs). Monitoring reports are published by Eurostat every two years.

 

 

 

The Sustainable Development Indicators (SDIs) are organized in a theme-oriented framework, reflecting the key challenges of the Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS). The ten themes follow a gradient from the economic, to the social, and then to the environmental and institutional dimensions. They are further divided into subthemes reflecting the operational objectives and actions of the SDS. The set of SDIs is flexible: new indicators can be added in repsonse to changes in the priorities of the SDS, bearing in mind that new issues emerge from time to time.

 

Different levels of SDIs respond to different user needs:

1. Headline indicators monitor the overall objectives related to the key challenges of the SDS. They are widely used indicators with a high communicative and educational value. They are robust and available for most EU Member States, generally for a minimum period of five years.
2. Operational indicators are related to the operational objectives of the SDS. They are lead indicators in their subthemes. They are robust and available for most EU Member States for a minimum period of three years.
3. Explanatory indicators are related to actions described in the SDS or to other issues which are useful for analyzing progress towards the strategy’s objectives. Breakdowns of higher level indicators, e.g. by gender or income group, are usually also found at this level.
4. Contextual indicators are part of the set, but either do not monitor directly a particular SDS objective, or they are not policy responsive. Generally, they are difficult to interpret in a normative way. However, they provide valuable background information on issues having direct relevance for sustainable development policies. For instance, ‘number of persons in households’, and ‘expenditure on care for the elderly’ are contextual SDIs.

• Indicators under development either already exist, but are of insufficient quality or coverage (e.g. not yet available for three years or for a majority of Member States), or are known to be currently under development. Indicators under developmemt are expected to become available within two years and of sufficient quality.
• Indicators to be developed are either known to be currently under development, but no final satisfactory result is expected within two years; or are not being currently developed.

The data tables, graphs and maps of the SDIs can be accessed by clicking on this icon:

Eurostat aims at having a quality profile for all sustainable development indicators (SDIs). The quality profile includes information on timeliness, accuracy, comparability and relevance, as well as information on how the indicator could be improved. For example, one SDI is ‘fish catches outside safe biological limits’. This indicator measures whether fish can replenish themselves. But the indicator combines statistics on catches with expert opinion on biological limits and is therefore not perfectly objective. This type of information is provided to users in the indicator’s quality profile.

 

The SDI quality profiles can be accessed by clicking on this icon:

 

Please address any comments or questions concerning the webpages on the EU Sustainable Development Indicators (EU SDIs) to the Eurostat SDI team via estat-sdi@ec.europa.eu