Cities – The engines for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals

This briefing note by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) discusses the critical role of cities in implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and details an IISD initiative to track SDG indicators across 13 major Canadian cities using official statistics.

• Cities are essential for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because they can adapt sustainable actions to specific local needs and integrate social, environmental, and economic development aspects.
• While the Inter-agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG–SDGs) and the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) have suggested approximately 150 established indicators, these cannot be directly applied to cities due to data availability limits and existing indicator lock-ins.
• IISD developed a tool using Statistics Canada databases to monitor 12 specific SDG indicators across 13 Canadian cities, providing normalized time-series data from 1995 to allow for historical trend analysis and comparability.
• Analysis of the city-level data indicates that progress toward SDGs is not uniform; for example, while tobacco use among young people generally declined, some cities struggled to maintain this progress, showing that success can be temporary.
• Although SDG targets are formally established at the national level, the document argues that implementation is shared across different levels of government, requiring coordinated action between cities, provinces, territories, and the federal government in Canada.

APA

Bizikova, L., & Pinter, L. (2017). Cities – The engines for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. International Institute for Sustainable Development. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/cities-the-engine-for-Implementing-sdgs.pdf

Chicago

Bizikova, Livia, and Laszlo Pinter. Cities – The engines for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2017. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/cities-the-engine-for-Implementing-sdgs.pdf.

Wikipedia

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BibTeX

@techreport{bizikova2017cities, author = {Bizikova, Livia and Pinter, Laszlo}, title = {{Cities – The engines for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals}}, institution = {International Institute for Sustainable Development}, year = {2017}, month = jun, url = {https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/cities-the-engine-for-Implementing-sdgs.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }