The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. Achieving sustainable development is the most important challenge facing our generation.

In 2015, the Australian Government, together with all United Nations member states, committed to an overarching framework for global development, titled Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the 2030 Agenda). It sets out 17 ambitious goals supported by 169 targets and 231 indicators designed to measure progress at a national level.

The Goals cannot be achieved without the support of city authorities. Although the targets and indicators are designed for national governments, two-thirds of the targets relate to cities. More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, with urban residents accounting for a disproportionate share of economic production, consumption, and associated waste.

Council is committed to the Goals as a guiding framework to ensure our initiatives achieve holistic sustainable development. We must play a role, and partner with others to address the challenges we all face, to ensure no one is left behind.

A VLR is a reporting mechanism for cities to report their progress towards the Goals.

During the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019, New York City launched the Voluntary Local Review (VLR) Declaration for local and regional governments worldwide to formally commit to report their local progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

The declaration consists of three key commitments:

• Commitment 1: To identify how existing strategies, programs, data, and targets align with the Sustainable Development Goals
• Commitment 2: To provide at least one forum where stakeholders can come together to share experiences, lessons learned, and information gathered using the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals
• Commitment 3: To submit a Voluntary Local Review to the United Nations during the United Nations High-Level Political Forum

We will use the data and insights in this Review to inform where Council will prioritise our effort through our annual planning and budget process. We will monitor progress annually through an annual performance scorecard and adjust our annual work program where necessary to improve performance over time.

We will conduct a Review every four years, in the lead up to each new Council Plan – which outlines our priorities over a four-year term and identifies key performance indicators to which we hold ourselves primarily accountable to the community. Our second Review will reflect on what we have done, how effective we have been ‘moving the dial’ and what needs to change.

City of Melbourne is the first city in Australia to make a VLR Declaration and produce a VLR. More than 330 local and regional governments have signed up to New York City’s Voluntary Local Review (VLR) Declaration, committing to localise the SDGs.