Since their adoption in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have increasingly gained attention from municipal leaders as a useful way to connect diverse municipal and community efforts around shared sustainability goals. Despite the momentum and action around the world, engagement with the SDGs in Canadian municipalities remains fairly limited.
Over the summer of 2025, we convened a series of conversations with leading global cities to learn how they have moved beyond the ambition and vision of the SDGs towards integration and impact in municipal processes and operations.
The Value of the SDGs to Municipalities
While the integration of the SDGs can take many different forms, we heard three key take-aways from our conversations (with select examples listed):
- The SDGs create coherence in planning by consolidating programs and policies under one comprehensive framework.
- Malmö, Sweden: Integrated the SDGs into existing steering and management systems and implemented a continuously updated "Platform 2030" that localizes the SDGs, connects them to the City’s five political goals, and presents data-driven analysis.
- Barcelona, Spain: Successfully set measurable SDGs targets for local issues like homelessness, aligned actions for mayoral mandates to relevant SDGs, and calculated the economic contributions of budgets towards their achievement.
- The SDGs create the impetus to plan for sustainable development using systems thinking to better understand the complexity and interconnectedness of community issues.
- Mannheim, Germany: Developed a citizen-led vision for the city using the SDGs to create the Mannheim 2030 Strategy. This vision was translated into seven strategic goals for the municipality that was incorporated into the city budget through the inclusion of regular reporting on money spent on priority themes and impact targets that relate to the strategic objectives.
- Strasbourg, France: Developed a Food Strategy using the multi-dimensional framework of the SDGs. The strategy and action plan advances all 17 SDGs by addressing components of food systems including equitable access to food, health, agricultural production, and food waste.
- The SDGs support partnerships and collaboration within the local and international community.
- Bristol, United Kingdom: Developed the Bristol SDG Alliance, a group a stakeholders from across the community (universities, City officials, major businesses, and community organizations) working together to drive the policy framework for long-term sustainable development of the city and region, to discuss, shape and improve SDGs implementation, and to link community action to global and national challenges.
- Los Angeles, United States: Created strong working relationships with local universities and colleges to engage over 100 undergraduate and graduate students in the SDGs localization efforts of the city. This work sparked the development of two Voluntary Local Reviews, an SDG data platform, and a mapping of SDG activities by community organizations, in addition to several international relationships.
Join us on November 6th for our webinar “Global Insights on Localizing the SDGs in Canada”, where we’ll talk with some of the cities we engaged to hear more about how they are working with the SDGs. Register here.
Read the full International Best Practices for Localizing the SDGs document here.