SDG 14: Life below water

The Sustainable Development Goal ‘Life below water' (SDG 14) aims to protect and ensure the sustainable use of oceans. This includes reducing marine pollution and ocean acidification, ending overfishing and conserving marine and coastal ecosystems. SDG 14 is strongly related to other SDGs as oceans sustain coastal economies and livelihoods, contribute to food production and function as a carbon sink.

In 2023, the quality of water on coastal bathing sites in the EU was very high with 88.4% of sites rated excellent, which was an increase of 3.4 percentage points (pp) when compared with 2013 (85.4%) and shows stability compared with 2022 (88.9%).

Source datasets:  sdg_14_40 and sdg_14_50 

The global mean surface seawater acidity in the EU had a pH value of 8.05 in 2022, representing a decrease of 0.02 compared with 2012 (8.07). The decline in pH indicates increased acidity of ocean water. Rising levels of atmospheric CO2 enhances the absorption of CO2 by oceans, leading to lower pH values.

How is your country doing?

Do you know the quality of water on the costal bathing sites in your country? Is it improving or getting worse?

The data visualisation tool ‘SDGs & me’ will help you to easily explore and evaluate the situation in your country and compare it to others.

The visualisation tool - SDG country overview  allows you to compare your country’s scores across all goals against the EU average. 

Would you like to learn more? 

You can find out more about the EU’s progress towards the SDGs with the following: 

• publication Sustainable Development in the European Union - monitoring report on progress towards the SDGs in an EU context, 2024 edition and the corresponding brochure provide an overview of progress towards the SDGs in the EU; 
• recording of the webinar on the EU’s progress, held on 20th June 2024.