The EU Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS), which was renewed in June 2006, sets out a coherent approach to how the EU will more effectively live up to its long-standing commitment to meet the challenges of sustainable development. It reaffirms the overall aim of achieving continuous improvement of the quality of life and well-being on earth for present and future generations, through the creation of sustainable communities able to manage and use resources efficiently and to tap the ecological and social innovation potential of the economy, ensuring prosperity, environmental protection and social cohesion.

The SDS requires the Commission to develop indicators at the appropriate level of details to monitor progress with regard to each particular challenge. A first set of indicators was adopted by the Commission in 2005 and further reviewed in 2007 in order to adjust to the SDS. Sustainable Development Indicators (SDIs) are used to monitor the EU SDS in a report to be published by Eurostat every two years.

The emphasis of these pages is on indicators as well as associated documentation for the EU and its Member States, as well as the Candidate Countries (Croatia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Turkey) and EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland) where possible.

The SDI framework is based on ten themes, reflecting the seven key challenges of the strategy, as well as the key objective of economic prosperity, and guiding principles related to good governance. The themes follow a general gradient from the economic, to the social, and then to the environmental and institutional dimensions. They are further divided into sub-themes to organise the set in a way that reflects the operational objectives and actions of the sustainable development strategy.

 

In order to facilitate communication, the indicator set is built as a three-level pyramid. This distinction between the three levels of indicators reflects the structure of the renewed strategy (overall objectives, operational objectives, actions) and also responds to different kinds of user needs, with the headline indicators having the highest communication value. The three-levels are complemented with contextual indicators, which provide valuable background information but which do not monitor directly the strategy’s objectives.

                          

The SDI set also describes indicators which are not yet fully developed but which would be necessary to get a more complete picture of progress, differentiating between indicators that are expected to become available within two years, with sufficient quality ('indicators under development'), and those to be developed in the longer term ('indicators to be developed').