Targets, indicators and SDG monitoring

Indicators capturing the impacts of national-level actions upon people, economies and the environment in other countries – known as spillover indicators – have a long tradition in the German Government’s sustainability reporting. Since 2006, for instance, foreign trade with least developed countries (Indicator 17.3 (External link)) has been an element of the German Sustainable Development Strategy (GSDS) as a rudimentary spillover indicator. This indicator captures the monetary revenue of these countries attributable to exports to Germany, yet provides no direct information about the social or ecological impacts of these exports in these countries.

In principle, every domestic activity can have remote effects abroad – positive or negative, intended or unintended. Foreign trade, in particular – both imports and exports – can lead to spillover effects. Imports from other countries often seek to utilise resources from those countries or to compensate for the absence of such resources at the domestic level.

Appraisals of spillover effects are often based on extensive and complex computation models – especially when they consider not just individual, specific goods. Input-output (IO) analyses are used to model these effects at the macro-economic level. Internationally, multiregional input-output tables (MIRO) with a relatively low resolution are available. Within Germany, there are detailed input-output tables and revenue-expenditure tables. To map these effects in the best possible manner, the Federal Statistical Office combines the results of national input-output calculations with detailed global information on material flows.

The current GSDS comprises four indicators concerned with a reduction of overall resource consumption – domestically and abroad – by domestic society: total raw material productivity (Indicator 8.1 (External link)) and global environmental uptake by private household consumption – measured in terms of raw material use, energy consumption and CO₂ emissions (Indicators 12.1.ba-bc (External link)).

Furthermore, the GSDS contains indicators that take account of human rights due diligence obligations in supply chains. These indicators do not involve measuring any direct impacts of product and trade on other countries. Instead, they track the proportion of products or companies that meet recognised sustainability criteria. They include Indicator 12.1.a (External link) “Market share of products certified by a state sustainability standard” and two indicators newly introduced in the 2025 update to the Strategy: 8.6 (External link) “Voluntary sustainability reporting of companies in line with the German Sustainability Code (DNK)” and 12.3.c (External link) “Sustainable textile procurement by the federal administration”.

Independent monitoring

The Federal Statistical Office publishes a report on the status of the GSDS indicators every two years. The Office conducts the assessment (External link) independently and on its own responsibility. At global level, Resolution A/RES/70/1 called for the building of the necessary statistical capacities and entrusted the statistical offices in the Interagency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) with the development of indicators to track 2030 Agenda progress. This underscores the importance of objective review of the SDGs by a competent and independent expert body.

Why do we need national targets and indicators?

The global SDGs cannot be transferred directly to Germany without adjustments. The reasons are diverse: A globally envisioned target value may already have been attained in Germany.

This is exemplified by the global Target 3.1 with SDG Indicator 3.1.1 “Maternal mortality ratio”. The target is to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births. In Germany, the ratio is currently between 3 and 4. The global target has thus already been attained here and is consequently not suited as a national target. Naturally, a further reduction of maternal mortality in Germany is desirable; however, this would exert little additional influence on the attainment of the global target. Instead, other national-level targets, such as those supporting health systems in countries where maternal mortality is high, can make better and more purposeful contributions to attainment of the global target – namely reducing the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births.

The global Target 6.1 “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all” is a further example. Water supply in Germany is regulated by the Federal Water Act and the water acts of the various Länder. Connection to and use of the public water supply are mandatory; this ensures that more than 99 per cent of the population has access to potable water. The global target is thus already almost entirely attained in Germany and is consequently not suited as an expedient national-level target. Germany can exert an influence upon the global target, however, by corresponding commitments in development cooperation. At national level, therefore, the target is mapped by Indicator 6.2.a “Development cooperation for drinking water supply”.

A number of targets do not concern Germany as formulated because Germany is neither a developing country nor a small island developing country. Here, too, national indicators can merely attempt to map on a regular basis how Germany supports target attainment within such countries.

Moreover, there are various targets and indicators which are suitable for the global level but cannot be transferred directly and with the same informative value to the national level. For instance, the two Target 8.4 (and 12.2) indicators for material footprint and material extraction from the environment are theoretically identical at the global level – but not at the national level. At this point, the 2030 Agenda indicators already anticipate the need to formulate supplementary national indicators.

In other cases, there can be deviations due to different regional standards and needs – for instance, in the case of SDG Indicator 6.3.1 “Proportion of domestic and industrial wastewater flows safely treated”. Here, national circumstances determine whether international standards can or should be viewed as national target values and whether the global definition is (still) relevant at all at national level or, instead, other technical priorities should be set at that level.

It follows that the indicators in the German Sustainable Development Strategy are not a sub-set of the global indicators, but independent indicators which, while tracking progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, are oriented to the national baseline situation and national challenges.

To do justice to these challenges in the most appropriate manner, many global indicators nowadays consist of comprehensive time series and sub-divisions. Strictly speaking, they are thus no longer indicators in the classic sense.

The purpose of sustainability indicators

The sustainability indicators set out in the 2030 Agenda at global level and in Germany’s Sustainable Development Strategy only provide selected insights into the state and development of a society and its environment. They mainly serve the communication and measurement of individual, prioritised targets for selected key areas. Neither the global Agenda 2030 indicators nor those of the GSDS can paint a truly comprehensive picture. The indicators at this level can serve as a point of entry to the underlying, far more wide-ranging monitoring and information systems that allow essential, in-depth analyses:

The information base

In addition to data on individual indicators, sustainability policy and the transformation towards a more sustainable society call for additional sources for a more complete information base that does justice to the issues addressed. Taking account of social, environmental and economic concerns within and beyond the boundaries of individual fields of policy requires reliable information on complex interlinkages cutting across the various policies. This information base must be characterised by substantial coherence across all issue areas in order to be able to address not only singular problems. It should serve as a basis for identifying drivers of development and taking account of interdependencies to an appropriate extent.

International statistical standards and systems – such as the System of National Accounts (External link) (SNA) and the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (External link) (SEEA) – provide a relevant methodological foundation for such a coherent information base. In their current form, they already allow the derivation of numerous indicators. Germany has long been active in developing and refining these systems. For reasons of resource efficiency, it is expedient to utilise these standards in order to integrate sustainability reporting seamlessly into the existing official statistical systems. A further benefit of such integration is that sustainability indicators and supplementary information – which is not an indicator in its own right – complement each other well in these statistical reporting systems.

Not all items of information required in the 2030 Agenda context must be indicators. Utilising such complementary information ensures that an indicator does not stand in isolation: Instead, these calculation systems allow more in-depth information to be analysed and, through its coherence, to assess with certainty the drivers of development and interdisciplinary influences.

The expansion of the existing systems is under discussion at both national and international levels. This will allow derivation in future of indicators tracking further relevant issue areas such as climate adaptation, biodiversity and the pollution crisis. Information gaps can then be closed in a targeted manner – for instance, in the context of Germany’s National Water Strategy and National Circular Economy Strategy.

New data sources – such as remote sensing data, data gathered through administrative enforcement activities or from environmental measurement networks – can be integrated in both technical and methodological terms into the existing macro-level statistical calculation systems. This type of integration of the most diverse basic data is essential to reveal certain interrelationships. The ecosystem accounting schemes (External link) already implemented and refined in Germany are an example.

The capabilities needed for such data integration differ markedly from those required for classic primary statistics. For one thing, human resources for conceptual and methodological processing are needed, as are expanded capacities for data processing and presentation. Furthermore, statistical offices need ready access to existing initial data, such as the data gathered by administrative enforcement. This calls for the creation or improvement of the necessary statutory and technical conditions at national level.

When are indicators on-track or off-track?

Objective assessment of target attainment is the key element of the specialised contribution of the Federal Statistical Office to the German Sustainable Development Strategy. Such assessment provides an initial appraisal of whether an indicator is on-track towards target attainment or not.

For this purpose, very simple and readily reproducible assessment methods are used that deliver an appraisal exclusively on the basis of the indicator’s past trajectory. They do not take account of estimated effects of policy measures upon the indicator’s future trajectory. They therefore do not deliver a forecast, but an appraisal of whether the indicator would reach or exceed the politically defined target at the next target date if developments continue to be as they currently are. If this is the case, or if the anticipated deviation from the target value is very small, the indicator is rated as being on-track.

The ways in which politically defined targets are formulated can vary: Some targets envisage attainment or exceedance of a certain value by a certain year; others only envisage a direction of development or compliance with certain ceilings or lower limits. The assessment methodology is adjusted to the specific way a target is formulated.

In the standard case, in which there is a concrete absolute or relative target value for a certain target year, the first step is to use the latest data points to determine the average of the most recent year-on-year changes. This average is assumed to apply to the future year-on-year trajectory up to the target year. If, based on this assumption, the anticipated deviation from the target value is less than 20 per cent of the difference between the current value and the target value, the indicator is rated as on-track. If the target value is anticipated to be missed by more than 20 per cent in the target year or the indicator’s trajectory has developed opposite to the direction of the target, it is rated as off-track.

Due to the relatively simple methodology, in some cases slight changes in the development of indicators over time can lead to an altered assessment. It is therefore advisable to consider the ratings in each case in the context of the assessments of previous reporting years. This is essential in order to recognise whether an assessment is attributable to a long-term, general trend of a given indicator or rather to a volatile trajectory and short-term changes.
Detailed information on national indicator assessment in connection with the German Sustainable Development Strategy (GSDS) is available on our website (External link).