While the EU has made progress towards most of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the past five years, the impact of the pandemic on some of the SDGs, while still partially measured, is undermining the achievement, according to the Eurostat monitoring report published on Tuesday 15 June.
This report - the fifth of its kind - is the second since the Commission started integrating the SDGs into the ‘European Semester’ (budgetary exercise of economic policy coordination), as foreseen in the European Green Deal, which aims at a modern, efficient and competitive economy and a just transition for all.
The significant progress in five years in reducing poverty and social exclusion (SDG 1) and improving the health situation in the EU (SDG 3) mentioned in the report should be put into perspective, as the assessment still refers to the period up to 2019, says Eurostat.
Economy, employment, education, inequality. The assessment of the other goals shows a slowdown in the average progress reported: in the area of the economy and the labour market (SDG 8), the Covid-19 crisis has interrupted the continuous improvement observed since 2013.
The number of young people aged 15-29 who are unemployed, not in school nor in training has increased from 12.6% in 2019 to 13.7% in 2020. “On the positive side, short-time work schemes, supported in many cases by the Commission’s SURE programme, have helped to cushion the impact of Covid-19 on the labour market, with unemployment only going up by 0.4 percentage points in 2020 compared to 2019”, said the European Commissioner for the economy, Paolo Gentiloni, in a statement.
Similar impacts are observed in the areas of Quality education (SDG 4), Gender equality (SDG 5), Reduced inequalities (SDG 10), and Partnerships for the goals (SDG 17), for which the 2020 data show a clear deterioration in the individual indicators.
The trend is slightly negative for SDG 7 ‘Affordable and clean energy’ and SDG 15 ‘Life on land’, from which the EU is falling a bit behind. For SDG 7, this trend is explained by the increase in EU energy consumption between 2014 and 2019. The assessment therefore does not yet reflect the - at least temporary - reductions expected for 2020.
The assessment of SDG 15 shows that ecosystems and biodiversity remain under pressure from human activities.
For SDG 13 ‘Climate action’, the trend is neutral based on current indicators. According to provisional estimates, by 2019 the EU had reduced its net greenhouse gas emissions by around 25% since 1990. Further progress will be needed to achieve a 55% reduction by 2030.
For SDG 6 ‘Clean Water and sanitation’ and SDG 14 ‘Life below water’ EU trends cannot be calculated due to lack of sufficient data for the last five years. For more information: https://bit.ly/3cGpJda (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)