On September 25, 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit officially adopted Change Our World – 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which sketched the blueprint for the development and cooperation of all countries in the coming years. As the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including 17 sustainable development goals and 169 targets, cover three major areas: economy, society and environment. One of the most important link in implementing SDGs is to measure and monitor each target of SDGs. In March, 2017, the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) reported to the UN Statistical Commission a global monitoring and statistical indicator system (IAEG-SDGs, 2017) containing 232 indicators, providing a globally harmonized measurement system, but the role in guiding national policy making is relatively limited, so the United Nations encourages countries to develop localized SDGs indicator systems.

SDGs bring China not only pressure and challenges, but also opportunities. China is the first in the world to release the “National Plan on Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and actively promote the action plan of the SDGs. The SDGs proposed by the United Nations are a universal framework with a wide range of 169 targets. How to evaluate these indicators quantitatively and statistically is still under research. To this end, it is necessary to combine China's existing national conditions and sustainable development level with some existing planning, policies and indicators and explore the establishment of a comprehensive monitorable, measurable and evaluable indicator system to measure the progress of China’s localized sustainable development.

Based on the United Nations SDGs Indicators Global Database as well as China’s reality, this study constructed a framework of 163 localized SDG indicators preliminarily and evaluated 17 SDGs in China's “12th Five-Year Plan” period, identify the existing strengths and weaknesses in China’s implementation of 2030 Agenda, as well as to provide suggestions for China’s achievement of sustainable development goals. It is expected to help the international community to better understand China's progress in implementation of sustainable development and inspire global realization of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This study is the research achievement of “China SDGs Indicators and Progress Assessment Report”, completed by Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning (CAEP) and World Wide Fund for Nature Beijing Office (WWF China). This is the first time to explore the indicator system in China and to establish China’s localized SDGs indicator system under the framework of the UN SDGs. Many thanks go to the National Bureau of Statistics(NBS) and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment for their supports(MEE).

China SDGs Indicators and Progress Assessment.pdf