Sustainable Development Goals and Australia
Open-knowledge reference entry
The "Sustainable Development Goals and Australia" describe how Australia participates in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process. The SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all". The SDGs, set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and intended to be achieved by the year 2030, are part of a UN Resolution called "The 2030 Agenda". The targets and indicators for the SDGs are included in the UN Resolution adopted by the General Assembly two years later on 6 July 2017.
The Commonwealth of Australia was one of the 193 countries that adopted the 2030 Agenda in September 2015. Implementation of the agenda is led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) with different federal government agencies responsible for each of the goals.
In November 2020, the Transforming Australia: SDG Progress Report stated that while Australia was performing well in health (SDG 3) and education (SDG 4) it was falling behind in the reduction of CO2 emissions (SDG 13), waste and environmental degradation (SDG 12, SDG 14 and SDG 15), and addressing economic inequality (SDG 10).
Australia is not on-track to achieve the SDGs by 2030. Four modelled scenarios based on different development approaches found that the 'Sustainability Transition' scenario could deliver "rapid and balanced progress of 70% towards SDG targets by 2020, well ahead of the business-as-usual scenario (40%)". In 2020, Australia's overall performance in the SDG Index is ranked 37th out of 166 countries (down from 18th out of 34 countries in 2015).
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This entry incorporates text from “Sustainable Development Goals and Australia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.