The progress of the Greek regions in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 2024 edition

In 2015, States around the world choose a universal approach for sustainable development to result into the achievement of several Goals and specific indicators, setting the milestone for the year 2030. (Agenda 2030, SDGs, Paris Climate Agreement). This decision was taken under the clear vision for the importance of the role played by regional and municipal authorities to implement the relevant targets. The current report follows the previous one, created in 2022, being essentialy the next step for a broadening and the deepening of the SDG's monitoring across the 13 Greek regions. This report also based on the literature created by the SDSN (Lafortune et al., 2019; Lafortune et al., 2021), which uses data from official statistics, academic research, and expert assessments to provide a total scoreboard per nation and target. The 2019 edition of the SDG Index which was launched at the United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development in July 2019 in New York, has been audited by the EU Joint Research Centre (JRC) has audited the SDG index created in 2019 (New York, UN High-level Political Forum) issuing the relevant methodology and the validity of the results (Papadimitriou, E., Fragoso Neves, A. and Becker, W., 2019). The current report performs the scoreboards in detail regarding SDG's and Indicators that are relevant for the achievement of sustainable development in the 13 Greek regions. Thessaly and the Eastern Macedonia & Thrace are holding the top of the score for 2023. Yet, major challenges remain in order to achieve all 17 SDGs. The 2023 SDG Index and Dashboards for Greek regions produce the following significant outcomes: - No region has achieved the goal for SDG 1 up to 13 and 16, while most of the regions have to overcome significant challenges. - Four (4) regions have already achieved the goal for SDG 15, while the other regions are facing moderate to mild challenges. - Two (2) regions have already achieved the target for SDG 14, while the other ones present moderate to mild challenges, holding a significant heterogeneity in their performance. - The regions of Attica, Southern Aegean and Crete will have to make more efforts to improve the scores that are now presenting significant and major challenges for the implementation of the SDGs by 2030, given that more than 3/5 of the Greek population lives in these areas (Eurostat, 2023). - There is a remarkable lack of reliable data at regional level for many of the indicators regarding SDG 12 and SDG 17, therefore it is necessary to improve data availability a at the level of Greek regions. One (1) region has seen to meet the goal for SDG 17, but seems to be normal since it is about the Capital of the country.