Europe Sustainable Development Report 2026 — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Published: 26 February 2026, by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the SDG Transformation Center, with Dublin University Press
Scope: 7th edition; 41 European countries (EU members, candidate countries, EFTA and the UK)
This year’s signal: Progress has stalled, and no European country is on track for all 17 Goals

Europe leads the world on the Sustainable Development Goals and is still not on course. No European country is on track to achieve all 17 SDGs, and the report finds progress has stalled just as political attention to the 2030 Agenda fades. Its sharper contribution is the method: it counts the costs rich countries push onto the rest of the world.

The headline

Finland, Sweden and Denmark top the 2026 SDG Index, and Norway leads the report’s separate Leave-No-One-Behind Index. Below the leaders the picture is one of stall, not advance. EU candidate countries score more than 11 points below the EU average, a measure of the convergence gap enlargement would have to close. Only Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark met the long-standing target of spending 0.7% of national income on development assistance, and public trust is thin, with fewer than 40% of citizens in France, Germany and the UK saying they trust their government.

Stoyan Tchoukanov, President of the European Economic and Social Committee’s NAT Section: “With less than five years remaining until 2030, Europe cannot afford complacency.”

The counting story

This is an independent, non-official index, a second opinion that sits alongside UN statistics rather than replacing them, and its methodology is statistically audited by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The feature that matters most for how it counts is international spillovers: the environmental and social costs a country exports through trade and consumption, which the official SDG indicator set largely leaves out. On this measure roughly 40% of the EU-27’s greenhouse-gas emissions are generated abroad. Pricing those costs in is why the report’s verdict on wealthy European countries is harder than their headline national numbers suggest.

Why it matters

The report names a political risk as much as a data one: references to the 2030 Agenda are thinning in recent European Commission work programmes, even as the underlying scores flatten. For a region that has framed itself as the SDG frontrunner, a stall plus fading commitment is the tension worth watching. As a regional, spillover-adjusted counterpart to the global SDG Report and the SDSN Sustainable Development Report, it feeds the same 2026 stocktake that governments carry into the High-Level Political Forum.

Watch & read

Europe Sustainable Development Report 2026, the full report (SDSN / SDG Transformation Center).
Europe SDG dashboards, the interactive country data.
The global Sustainable Development Report 2026, the SDSN worldwide index this sits within.

Figures are drawn from the report and the publisher’s launch materials. The SDG Index is an independent assessment and is not an official UN statistic.