A vague understanding about the Sustainable Development Goals for the French people

If 10% of French people claim to know "what the Sustainable Development Goals are", their perception of the SDGs still seems to be fairly vague, with many respondents selecting "Don’t know" or fairly random answers to more detailed questions.

This lack of awareness remains very stable between September 2019 and October 2023.

To which countries to the Sustainable Development Goals apply?

On average, 21% of respondents know (or understand) that the SDGs apply universally to all countries. More men (26%) than women (16%) correctly answer this question, but this result should be considered keeping in mind that women are consistently more likely to give a "don’t know" answer than men in opinion polls. For instance, there’s an 18 percentage point difference between men’s "don’t know" (38%) and women (56%).

Clearly, the scope of the SDGs is better known among French people between 18 and 24 years old, who are the most likely to have selected the correct answer "all countries of the world". There is a difference of 6 percentage points between respondents aged 18 to 24 and those over 45.

Among those who have correctly selected the right answer there are slightly more center or right wing voters than left wing voters (+4 percentage points), which can be confirmed by the "don’t know" rate.

Unsurprisingly, the higher the level of education, the better the knowledge of the SDGs. 25% of respondents who declare to have at least Bac+2 know that the SDGs apply to every country in the world, ie. +7 percentage points compared to those who say they have no more than a baccalauréat.

How many Sustainable Development Goals are there?

This seemingly simple question immediately demonstrated the lack of knowledge about the SDGs amongst the French public. 90% were not able to know how many SDGs had been agreed (by the United Nations) in the 2030 Agenda. It corresponds to the highest "don’t know" rate in this series of questions. Only 10% knew there were 17 Goals, i.e. +2 percentage points compared with the data collected in August 2021. While this figure is probably partly based on chance, it is nevertheless consistent with the 10% of French people who say they know what the SDGs are (data from October 2023).

When we delve a bit deeper into the answer, once again we can observe how much people from 18 to 44 have better knowledge than older generations of the SDGs, ie. +10 percentage points.

For reasons that might be correlated with other factors (level of education, age, etc.), center and right-wing supporters are also twice as likely as left-wing supporters to be able to give an answer to this question. This observation is confirmed by the "don’t know" rates.

On this point, there’s no consistency between a higher level of education and the ability to select the right answer, although fewer respondents with at least a Bac+2 declared that they couldn’t answer this question.

Even if some French people are aware of the existence of the SDGs, the correct figure (17 SDGs) doesn’t seem to be so easily appropriated by people. Always associating the figure "17" with the word "SDG" could easily make a difference in this respect.

What is the deadline to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals?

This is the detail question that now has the most correct answers. In August 2018, only 12% of French people were able to select "2030". Three years later, in August 2021, the rate of correct answers rose to 32%, a strong increase (+20 percentage points), suggesting that the deadline for the SDGs is much better known. In fact, in October 2023, 25% of respondents were able to identify the correct answer, which means that from one survey wave to the next, a proportion of responses are probably due to chance. The "don’t know" rate in 2018 (63%) also fell in 2021 (41%), before rising again in 2023 (51%).

Significantly more center-leaning supporters (15%) than those on the left (7%) or right (5%) have selected "2030". Furthermore, the rate of correct answers to this question related to the deadline for the 2030 Agenda is distributed in similar proportions according to the socio-demographic discriminants in terms of age or level of education like in the two questions above.