The 2030 Agenda, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, proposes the achievement, by 2030, of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that set 169 goals to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all.

In 2017, the United Nations Statistical Commission adopted a list of over 200 useful indicators for monitoring the progress made by countries in pursuing the Agenda. It is a system of indicators of great complexity that includes within it some consolidated and available indicators for most countries, and others that are not currently produced or that have not yet been exactly defined at an international level. In any case, it is a system in continuous evolution. The work of production and analysis of the metadata necessary for the construction of the indicators, carried out – also with the collaboration of Istat – by the Inter-Agency Expert Group of the UN, will lead in 2020 to the revision of the list of the indicators themselves, to which another will follow in 2025. In this context, the issue of the modernization and strengthening of statistical systems at national and global level is of crucial importance. The road to be traveled internationally is defined by the Cape Town Global Action Plan, a plan resulting from the work of the High-level Group for Partnerships, Coordination and Capacity-Building for Statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in 2017. Istat is actively engaged, not only in the framework of the National Statistical System (Sistan), but also internationally, working with the United Nations Statistics Division and offering its technical cooperation in capacity building activities of other national statistical systems.

In this sense it should be noted, for example, that in the last year Istat, in collaboration with the Italian Development Cooperation Agency, has launched several statistical cooperation projects in the SDGs area; initiatives that lead researchers to collaborate with the statistical institutions of three different countries: Vietnam, Palestine, Tanzania. Starting from December 2016, ISTAT has made available, every six months, many indicators for Italy on the information platform dedicated to the SDGs on the Institute’s website. The platform is currently populated by 273 measures that respond, often supplementing it, to the informative question that emerges from most of the indicators proposed by the UN. From 2018 Istat provides a Research Report on SDGs as an orientation tool within this complex system. In addition to Italy’s positioning along the path of sustainable development, the Report offers some thematic and analytical insights. In particular, this year a special effort was made in order to make available a greater number of breakdowns of the indicators that allow a deeper analysis both at a territorial level and with respect to the different socio-demographic characteristics of people. The link between policies and indicators for monitoring is increasingly close. In March 2018, on the initiative of the Ministry of the Environment and the Protection of the Territory and the Sea, a working table on indicators was set up to implement the National Sustainable Development Strategy (SNSvS) which defined a first restricted group and representative of indicators for monitoring the Strategy starting from those made available to Istat on its platform.