The Asia and Pacific SDG Progress Report 2017

The report is an assessment of the progress towards the SDG targets in Asia and the Pacific and its subregions. Drawing on the analysis of 66 indicators (60 global SDG indicators and 6 proxy indicators) the report forecasts likely progress by 2030 and identifies areas where greater effort is needed.

More specifically, the report addresses the following three broad issues:

• Regional progress on SDG implementation: Part I of the report provides a snapshot of where Asia and the Pacific stands in 2017 on 16 SDGs, and a dashboard of the goal and target areas for which the region either needs to maintain the current pace of progress, quicken the pace or reverse a negative trend to achieve the 2030 vision. For the target areas where the region has been slow or receding, the report quantifies the size of the progress gaps and the magnitude of the efforts that are required for all targets to be achieved.

• Progress at the subregional level: Part II provides a snapshot of progress towards achieving the SDGs in five Asia-Pacific subregions and four income groups. The analysis identifies goals and targets where each subregion and income group has been doing well. It also highlights where progress has been slow or entirely absent, and an assessment of the scale of the effort required to accelerate progress.

• Disparities in progress towards the goal and target areas: Part III examines how at regional level, progress is determined by different countries’ varying rates of progress towards the SDGs. The analysis highlights six scenarios for the Asia-Pacific region across the goals and targets and sets out the policy implications for each of them.

The assessment of progress contained in this report is limited by data availability. It is important to note upfront that only 25 per cent of the official SDG indicators can be used to assess progress in Asia and the Pacific due to limited data availability. Large data gaps limit a comprehensive and robust progress assessment of the SDGs. Out of the 66 indicators the report has used to track progress, 60 are official global SDG indicators and the other six are proxy indicators to cover goals for which sufficient evidence is not available.

The report can be found at: http://www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/publications/Asia-Pacific-SDG-Progress-Report-2017.pdf