Reviewing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals: Importance and Progress

The United Nations introduced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, aiming to tackle economic, social and environmental problems that exist in the world and to promote the concept of sustainability and sustainable development. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review regarding the background of sustainable development and each one of the 17 SDGs; an in-depth analysis of the problems addressed in each goal is provided and these problems’ impacts in the world are identified. The importance of achieving each goal is highlighted, while recent data regarding the targets included in each goal are provided, as well as the mean changes of these data for the past few years, based on a trend analysis that we performed. An evaluation of the achievement of various targets is discussed; we highlight the need of improvement of various SDGs’ progress, including the 4th, 11th and 13th SDG