Local actions and strategies are essential to implementing SDGs, thus making a difference to everyone’s life and contributing to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda.
The monitoring of progress regionally requires a robust framework of indicators. However, such a framework does not yet exist. The pilot project “REGIONS2030: Monitoring the SDGs in the EU regions - Filling the data gaps” intends to address this need. It is a collaboration between the European Parliament, the European Commission and 10 regions, to design and test indicators for monitoring the SDGs regionally in Europe and, ideally, to harmonise this at EU level.
In a series of events, each of the 10 participating regions will involve regional stakeholders in the monitoring process, provide tailored support for data collection and analysis, share regional good practices, and ensure better collaboration between all spheres of government to implement the 2030 Agenda. These events are co-organised by the pilot regions and the Joint Research Centre (JRC).
The first two are held in Greece: in Mytilene (North Aegean Region) and Kozani (Western Macedonia Region).
On 27 June, Mytilene hosted the event: “Sustainable Development Goals for Sustainable Regional Futures” (agenda available). Participants from 45 organisations identified links between development priorities, analyse the availability of reliable data, discussed strategies to implement the SDGs on small islands, and learned good practices from other EU regions.
On 6 July, Kozani will host “Sustainable Development Goals Framework 2030 – Western Macedonia leads the way” (agenda available). This event will focus on the region’s vision and development path to achieve the 2030 Agenda, on links with EU funding and policies, and on cooperation opportunities. The potential synergies in SDG- monitoring nationally, in Western Macedonia, and in other Greek regions will be discussed. The event, to be held in Greek, will be web streamed.
The remaining eight regions will hold events in September/October. Watch the local SDGs webpage to know more about these and other upcoming events!
Collaborating for development
“REGIONS2030: Monitoring the SDGs in the EU regions - Filling the data gaps” was proposed by MEP Petros Kokkalis in 2021 and approved by the European Commission in 2022. Supported by the European Parliament, the pilot project was developed by the JRC in collaboration with Eurostat and the European Commission’s department for regional and urban policy (DG Regio).
The 10 pilot regions are:
By exploring the synergies between monitoring, policy-making and sustainable regional development and working with experts and partners to develop, test and refine a new data framework, they will help define a method and identify NUTS2-level indicators which could be used across the EU.
Additional customised indicators could be proposed to reflect the diversity of local contexts, with the aim of covering all SDGs and most of the 169 UN targets.
Find out more about the REGIONS2030 project.
