The European Committee of the Regions' commission for Economic Policy (ECON) today adopted unanimously an opinion on the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals prepared by Ricardo Rio, Mayor of Braga.
The COVID-19 crisis, climate change and growing geopolitical tensions are putting the achievement of all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 at risk. Cities and regions are deeply concerned by the reversal of progress in the implementation of the United Nations’ SDGs in the EU while at the same time building up and supporting their recovery. In a draft opinion on the topic, ECON members urged the European Commission to boost and accelerate action on SDGs to ensure a successful framework leading to a fairer, greener and more prosperous future. SDGs hence must be increasingly integrated in the European Semester and better harnessed to the EU recovery, notably in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans which are requested to Members States in order to spend the resources of the €724 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
The rapporteur Ricardo Rio, said: "Cities and Regions are committed to the Sustainable Development Goals and its importance for a sustainable recovery and long-term sustainable growth. That is why the European Committee of the Regions is reinforcing the need of its achievement all across the European Union."
The opinion, calls for stronger EU engagement and for an overall strategy for implementation of the SDGs and draws attention to the role and resources of local and regional authorities (LRAs). It highlights that an increasing number of cities and regions in Europe are using SDGs to support their overall strategy for growth/recovery, and that this territorial dimension must be included in the EU's contribution to the UN SDG Summit in September 2023.
In his opinion, Rio reaffirms that the implementation of the Green Deal can only be a success if it is carried out within the framework of the SDGs, which requires bridges between SDG localisation and Local Green Deals. Rio also expressed concern that the indicators used to assess SDGs are all national level. This implies that for medium-sized and large countries, these assessments do not reflect reality on the ground, as there are large disparities within countries. Hence, it is of the utmost importance for Eurostat's annual SDG monitoring report to contain NUTS-2-level data as well as illustrative good practices at regional and local level. It also stresses that the CoR, as well as LRAs and their associations are important collectors of data and can make a practical contribution to enriching the EU SDG monitoring report.
The opinion is scheduled to be adopted during the CoR plenary session in February 2023.
Background:
According to the OECD, 65% of SDGs cannot be achieved without the involvement of local and regional authorities. Therefore, cities and regions underlined the importance of involving significant data and good practice from the local and regional level in the EU Annual SDGs monitoring report to showcase cities' and regions' sheer effort to implement SDGs. To access SDGs on the ground and provide a framework for regions to monitor them in their territory, the CoR supports the pilot project “Monitoring the SDGs in the EU regions - Filling the data gaps - REGIONS2030", which was launched by the Joint Research Center on 29 November.