The City of Melbourne commits to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guiding framework to ensure our activities, initiatives and programs achieve holistic sustainable development. In April 2021, City of Melbourne made a public commitment to produce a Voluntary Local Review. A VLR is a process in which local governments confirm their commitment to the SDGs and voluntarily assess their progress toward specific targets in the 2030 Agenda.

In March 2022, we released our draft Voluntary Local Review – a first for Melbourne – and undertook a period of engagement to:

• Inform the community and corporate organisations about the SDGs and our commitment to using the framework to guide our work, including establishing a baseline for levels of awareness in the community and identifying which SDGs are considered most important.
• Consult to identify local community and corporate action already taking place that contributes to the achievement of the SDGs and identify ideas for the future.

We undertook two streams of engagement to hear from both the broader community and more specifically organisations operating in the City of Melbourne.

Engagement with Melbourne based organisations took place during 20 April and 16 May 2022 through direct contact with known individuals within organisations. More information on this stream of engagement can be found in our Community Engagement Summary report.

We asked the community to tell us what’s happening in our city contributing towards the Goals and to highlight such community projects. Community engagement on the draft Voluntary Local Review occurred between 16 March to 20 April via a survey and a community ideas wall on a dedicated Participate Melbourne webpage.

The majority of respondent were individuals (76 per cent) and small business representatives with less than 50 employees (11 per cent). The remaining respondents were from local government, state government, the university sector, or medium to large businesses.

The majority of respondents are familiar with the SDGs, with 59 per cent knowing a lot and 34 per cent knowing a little. Only 8 per cent are not familiar with the SDGs at all.

The majority of respondents feel the SDGs are very important (80 per cent) or somewhat important (13 per cent) and only 8 per cent feel they are not important at all.

The top five responses to which Goals survey respondents felt were most important include:

• They are all equally important (34 per cent)
• Reduced inequalities (32 per cent)
• Climate action (32 per cent)
• Sustainable cities and communities (29 per cent)
• Responsible consumption and production (18 per cent)

Eighty two per cent of respondents or their organisation are working to progress the Goals. The top four responses to which Goals respondents are currently working on include:

• Good health and wellbeing (42 per cent)
• Sustainable cities and communities (36 per cent)
• Climate action (36 per cent)
• All of the Goals (32 per cent)

Following closely are Quality education (29 per cent), Industry, innovation and infrastructure (29 per cent), Reduced inequalities (29 per cent) and Peace, justice and strong institutions (29 per cent).

Encouragingly, the majority of respondents think it is everyone’s responsibility to achieve the Goals (90 per cent). Five per cent think it is the Federal Government’s responsibility, 3 per cent think it is the State Government’s responsibility and 3 per cent think it is the private sector’s responsibility to achieve the Goals.

Community wall highlight - The City of Melbourne Scholarship and Partnership

The Pinnacle Foundation provides educational scholarships, mentoring and opportunities for young LGBTIQ+ Australians to realise their full potential and overcome challenges arising from their identity. Every Pinnacle scholar is carefully matched with a mentor who will typically share the same academic and professional interests, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Community wall highlight – Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) idea jams with local governments to collaborate

IdeaScale led twenty SDGs CONNECT idea jams from March 2019, at the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne. This led to a ‘Food for Thought’ SDGs dinner held at Indigenous social enterprise Charcoal Lane, with representatives from all levels of government, industry, investors, social enterprises, start-ups, non-profits and the university sector.

In a unique pro-bono project, IdeaScale has since joined forces with IBM to drive innovation and collaboration across the local government sector to progress the Goals. Engaging with leaders from over 40 local government authorities across Australia, IdeaScale is now in the process of co-creating two projects – an SDGs Data Hub and an SDGs Maturity Index for the local government sector.

We reached out in the development of our Voluntary Local Review to identify what’s already happening in our city to progress the Goals and to identify which Goals are considered most important.

It is our intent to grow a local and international network of people, organisations and ideas to progress the municipality towards the SDGs.

The final Voluntary Local Review 2022 was presented to the Future Melbourne Committee on 14 June 2022 for final endorsement. Councillors unanimously supported Melbourne’s Voluntary Local Review, the first of its kind in Australian local government.

The Voluntary Local Review 2022 provides a baseline for ongoing monitoring and evaluation. It will enable us to keep track of how we are progressing across the SDGs. We will conduct a Review every four years in the lead up to each new Council Plan, to identify where we need to prioritise our effort.

The Council Plan 2021-25 outlines our priorities over a four-year term and identifies key performance indicators to which we hold ourselves primarily accountable to the community.

The second Review will reflect on what we have done, how effective we have been ‘moving the dial’ and what needs to change – to inform our next Council Plan. Priorities are likely to shift depending on what the data is telling us. We will also monitor progress annually and adjust our annual work program accordingly.