Sustainable Development Report 2026 (SDSN) — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Authors: Jeffrey D. Sachs, Guillaume Lafortune, Grayson Fuller, Guilherme Iablonovski
Publisher: The SDG Transformation Center, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)
What it is: The independent global SDG stocktake, built on the SDG Index and Dashboards (0–100 country scores and rankings)
Not to be confused with: the UN’s official SDG Report 2026 (this one is the SDSN “shadow” version)

Every year two big global stocktakes land within weeks of each other: the UN’s official SDG Report, and this one, the independent SDG Index from Jeffrey Sachs’s team. They tell the same story with different numbers, and the gap between those numbers is exactly what SDGCounting exists to explain.

The headline, and the other headline

The SDSN report is blunt: on current trends, none of the 17 Goals will be achieved by 2030, and just 16.5% of targets are on track. The UN’s official report, weeks earlier, led with 36% “on track or making moderate progress.” Both are correct. The difference is almost entirely the “moderate progress” bucket: count it as progress and roughly a third of targets qualify; require a target to be genuinely on pace and the figure falls to about one in six. It is the clearest illustration this year of how much an SDG headline depends on where you draw the line.

Sustainable Development Report 2026: “Based on current rates of progress, none of the 17 SDGs will be achieved by 2030.”

What the Index shows

The leaderboard. Finland tops the Index (score 87.4), followed by Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Germany; the Nordic countries again lead. South Sudan ranks last of 169 countries scored, a bottom shaped by conflict and fiscal fragility.
The movers. East and South Asia is the fastest-progressing region since 2015: India has climbed 18 places in the rankings and China 14, while the United States has slipped 5 places to 45th.
Where it is worst. SDGs 11, 14, 15 and 16 (cities, oceans, land and peace) are the most off track and have stagnated since 2015; the strongest gains are in connectivity and health.
A politics index. The report pairs the SDG Index with an Index of Support for UN-Based Multilateralism, on which Barbados ranks first and the United States last, a statistical outlier after withdrawing from 60-plus international organizations in January 2026.
The scale problem. Global military spending reached $2.9 trillion in 2025, more than the entire annual SDG financing gap for the developing world.

The counting angle

This is the counting question in its purest form. Two credible institutions, using different indicator sets and different thresholds for “on track,” produce headlines that sound far apart (36% versus 16.5%) while describing the same reality. Neither is wrong; they are answering slightly different questions. The value of reading them together is that the direction is unmistakable even when the number is contested, and the honest way to cite SDG progress is to say which scorecard, and which threshold, a figure comes from.

Our read: Sachs frames the failure as one of means, not ends: “we have willed the goals. Now we must will the means.” That is the same diagnosis as the UN’s report and the financing report, arrived at from the outside. When the official and independent counts converge on the same conclusion, the conclusion is hard to argue with.

Watch & read

Sustainable Development Report 2026, the full report, Index and dashboards (SDSN).
The SDG Report 2026, the UN’s official version, for the contrast.

Scores and ranks are from the SDSN SDG Index; the report states its views do not reflect those of any UN body.