Introduction

Regional commissions of the United Nations organize regional forums on sustainable development for international exchanges among governments and other stakeholders. In the region of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which comprises 56 countries of Europe, North America and Central Asia, the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development will be held for the tenth time on 21 and 22 April 2026 in Geneva.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development cannot be fulfilled without relevant and timely data and statistics to track progress. UNECE disseminates knowledge and data on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through its designated platforms – the Knowledge Hub, Dashboard and Database. Guidance for national statistical offices on how to manage a system for statistics and indicators for SDGs is contained in the UNECE Road Map1. Since 2020, the UNECE Division for Statistics and Data has prepared annual reports on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals in the UNECE region, to inform debates of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development. This seventh report provides an up-to-date assessment of progress as well as stories about regional and country-level actions for sustainable development.

1 UNECE (2022). Road map on statistics for Sustainable Development Goals – second edition. Geneva: United Nations.

The assessment covers every goal and target for which there are data and for which it is possible to set a target value. While the assessment looks at the trends at the regional level only, it is understood that variation among countries is sizable in all areas and a trend in any individual country may differ from the general trend observed in the region. The regional assessment presented in this 2026 report relies on the global indicator framework for SDGs2 and the available data on UNECE countries in the United Nations Global SDG Indicators Database as of 24 December 2025. In this report, the assessment is provided for the UNECE region as a whole (56 countries) as well as for the group of 17 UNECE countries participating in technical cooperation programmes of the United Nations, denoted as “programme countries”3. Technical notes on the progress assessment at the end of this report explain the methodology used.

2 United Nations (2025). Global indicator framework for the Sustainable Development Goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/RES/71/313, E/CN.3/2018/2, E/CN.3/2019/2, E/CN.3/2020/2, E/CN.3/2021/2, E/CN.3/2022/2,
E/CN.3/2023/2, E/CN.3/2024/4, E/CN.3/2025/6.

3 Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Tajikistan, Türkiye, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.

The agencies and United Nations country teams participating in the Regional Coordination Group on Data and Statistics for Europe and Central Asia and UNECE programmes contributed stories. These stories provide rich insights into the ways in which various regional and country level actions relate to sustainable development outcomes. Most of the stories pertain to the goals that are under in-depth review by the 2026 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development: 6 – Clean water and sanitation; 7 – Affordable and clean energy; 9 –Industry, innovation and infrastructure; 11 – Sustainable cities and communities; and 17 –Partnerships for the goals.