The first set of national sustainable development indicators was prepared in 2000. Since then the indicators have been published and renewed regularly, especially when the new sustainable development strategy was completed.

The state of and trends in sustainable development in Finland were being monitored and reviewed with the use of 39 national sustainable development indicators. These indicators were identified in 2014 to measure the progress of the eight strategic objectives of Society’s Commitment. Finland’s national follow-up system was renewed in 2017. It consists of around 45 indicators that are grouped in ten baskets with specific themes, such as “Resource-wise economy and carbon-neutral society”, “Housing and communities”, “Social inequality” and “Global responsibility and policy coherence”. Around one third of national indicators are from the global SDG indicator set, two thirds are country specific.

National indicators were chosen in 2017 by the national follow-up network that is chaired by the Prime Minister’s Office, and includes representatives from ministries, Statistics Finland, research institutions and various stakeholder groups. The national follow-up network meets 4-6 times per year.

National indicators are updated once a year, during the second and third quarter. The annual update of data is accompanied with the preparation of interpretative text for each of the ten baskets. Interpretative texts are prepared by experts of different ministries and research institutions. The purpose of interpretative texts is to describe the current state and recent development in Finland, compared to target levels (where they exist) and peer countries.

Indicators and interpretative texts are published at a website hosted by the National Commission on Sustainable Development and the Prime Minister’s Office. The Finnish website includes a possibility to openly comment indicators and interpretative texts. You can find the English version of the website here.

In 2018, Statistics Finland started a project to establish a national reporting platform for global SDG indicators. The platform was published in February 2019, and is currently publicly available at the webpage of Statistics Finland. In February 2020, the database contained national data for 158 global indicators of the total of 244 indicators, i.e. the coverage was 65 percent of global SDG indicators.