Alignment of the European Green Deal, the Sustainable Development Goals and the European Semester Process: Method and Application

The Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) along with the European Green Deal and its 9 Policy Areas, are the key strategic frameworks for the transformation of Europe into a climate-neutral continent in the future decades. Thus, the mandates derived from these contexts must be taken into consideration by the European countries. This report aims to suggest a methodology for the co-integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the European Green Deal (EGD), with the Country-specific recommendations (CSRs) made by the European Commission as part of the Semester process. At the same time, all these should be aligned with the EU Recovery Plan, to supply applicable strategies to the European policymakers and strengthen the national recovery Plans of the Member States, which are driven by the above-mentioned EU-driven packs, in line with the superior UN Agenda for the Sustainable Development. For the alignment of CSRs, the SDGs, and the EGD a 3D-mapping approach is proposed. After the Introduction in Section 1, the framework of the applicable Policies is presented in Section 2 and our Methodology is described in Section 3. In Section 4 our results are demonstrated for the EU and in Section 5 the main conclusions are listed along with a discussion for future directions. Our analysis shows that overall, the EU has sufficiently incorporated the SDGs in its strategic priorities, although there is still room for improvement. Several issues identified by SDSN’s Sustainable Development Report 2020 either as major or significant challenges have not been captured by the CSRs. The role of these Country-specific results and their mapping, as provided in the Supplementary Material, is to support the EU Commission and the Member States to reinforce the alignment of their policy priorities with the ambitions of the major Sustainability Agenda.