Written by Olivia Nater | Published: September 23, 2025
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 finds that only 18 percent of targets are on track to be met by their 2030 deadline. Alarmingly, the same proportion of targets have gotten worse relative to 2015, while the remainder are either stagnating or progressing much too slowly.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 goals designed to accelerate sustainable development and bring about well-being for all on a healthy planet. They were unanimously adopted in 2015 by all 193 United Nations member states (at the time) and were intended to be achieved by 2030.
Each goal contains a set of targets, and every year, the UN publishes a report on the progress (or lack thereof) that has been made towards each target based on a set of indicators.
This year’s report once again confirms that progress is far too slow, with a measly 18 percent of targets on track to be achieved by 2030, while another 18 percent have regressed below the 2015 baseline. There has essentially been no improvement from the previous year, when 17 percent were on track and as many were deteriorating.
According to this year’s report, 17 percent of targets are making “moderate” progress, 31 percent show “marginal” progress, and 17 percent have made no progress at all.
The foreword of the 2025 report by UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns,
“We face a global development emergency. Over 800 million people are trapped in extreme poverty. Carbon dioxide levels are at the highest in over two million years, and 2024 was the hottest year on record, surpassing the 1.5°C threshold. Peace and security have worsened, with over 120 million people forced from their homes, more than double the number in 2015.”
Ending poverty and hunger, reducing inequalities, and protecting the environment should be unambiguously desirable, but a United States government spokesperson sent shockwaves through the international development community at a UN conference earlier this year when he said that the US “rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and will no longer reaffirm the SDGs as a matter of course.”
Trump’s devastating foreign aid cuts have put these words into action — while it is too early for the latest report to reflect the impacts of Trump’s second term, we can safely assume that the 2026 report will be an even more dire read.
The 2025 report points out some serious data gaps due to lack of monitoring, primarily as result of funding shortfalls. Some of the critical goals most relevant to Population Connection’s work, for example, don’t have enough data availability to determine global trends. These include Goal 5 (Gender equality) and Goal 13 (Climate action), for which less than 30 percent of countries have trend data available.
Trump is only exacerbating this data shortfall. His dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in February 2025 led to the suspension of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which for 40 years have been a leading source of data for monitoring progress on multiple SDG indicators, particularly those under Goal 3 (Good health and well-being), Goal 5 (Gender equality), and Goal 2 (Zero hunger). For example, indicator 5.6.1 (which is the first indicator under target 6 for Goal 5), the proportion of women who make their own informed decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use, and reproductive healthcare, is almost entirely dependent on DHS data.
The available data suggests that the 25 targets in the below table are on track to be met by 2030. Most of these targets are a little vague because they lack numeric aims, so being “on track” merely means that things are moving in the right direction. Others, however, are certainly significant and worth celebrating, such as equal education access for girls.
Which targets are deteriorating?On the flipside, the following 25 targets are actually worse off now than a decade ago. These include some very concerning ones, such as the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition. In 2024, an estimated 638-720 million people were undernourished, up from around 577 million in 2015. Undernourishment even increased proportionally, to 8.2 percent of the population in 2024, compared to 7.7 percent in 2015. The number of people affected by food insecurity also rose significantly, in both absolute and proportional terms, to 2.3 billion (28 percent of the population) in 2024 from around 1.6 billion (21.4 percent of the population) in 2015. Similarly, governments have augmented rather than decreased fossil fuel subsidies, while biodiversity loss is still accelerating.
In light of the aforementioned data gap, it is likely the actual number of regressing targets is even higher. Out of the nine targets under Goal 5 (Gender equality) for example, four have insufficient data to be assessed. Importantly, these include target 5.6, reproductive health access and rights, and target 5.2, violence against women and girls, both of which are suffering under the backlash against women’s rights associated with the rise of the far-right.
Population growth as a barrierRapid population growth presents a significant barrier to the achievement of the SDGs — when populations grow faster than available resources, services, and infrastructure, major setbacks occur. While the report does not discuss this issue, it notes, for example, that the number of people affected by tuberculosis increased between 2022 and 2023, mainly due to population growth. Similarly, it warns that while child marriage has become less common at a global level, sub-Saharan Africa is expected to see an increase in the number of child brides by 2030, “driven by slow progress and rapid population growth.”
At Population Connection, we recognize that slowing and ending population growth by investing in women’s and girls’ empowerment is a prerequisite for achieving all 17 of the SDGs. Unless governments dramatically increase efforts to fight the alarming regression on women’s rights and mobilize funding for vulnerable communities, we will have no chance of achieving the SDGs, especially not within the next five years.
