Heimsmarkmið — Iceland's UN Sustainable Development Goal statistics

Iceland's implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda. Hagstofa Íslands publishes 137 national SDG indicators (all 17 goals) via a public open-sdg instance.

• Site: heimsmarkmidin.hagstofa.is (Icelandic) / heimsmarkmidin.hagstofa.is/en/ (English)
• Data repo: hagstofan.github.io/heimsmarkmid-data-prod/ (GitHub Pages)
• Platform: open-sdg — same toolkit used by UK, US, and ~20 other national SDG portals. If you know one, you know all of them.

Architecture

Frontend is a server-rendered Jekyll static site. Underlying data and metadata are published as flat files on a sibling GitHub Pages repo:

Path	Contents
/is/data/{code}.csv	Time-series data with disaggregation columns
/is/meta/{code}.json	Indicator metadata (name, source, graph config, units)
/is/headline/{code}.csv	Headline series only (no disaggregation)
/is/comb/{code}.json	Combined JSON (data + headline, structured for charting)
/is/zip/all_indicators.zip	All 137 data CSVs in one 437 KB download
/en/...	English-language mirror of the above

Indicator codes follow the UN SDG nomenclature: goal-target-indicator, e.g. 1-1-1 (Goal 1 · Target 1 · Indicator 1) or 16-b-1 (target "b", indicator 1).

Usage

# Download the ZIP, extract to data/raw/heimsmarkmid/, build catalog CSV
uv run python scripts/heimsmarkmid.py fetch
uv run python scripts/heimsmarkmid.py fetch --force    # Re-download (ZIP is cached)

# Print catalog
uv run python scripts/heimsmarkmid.py list
uv run python scripts/heimsmarkmid.py list --goal 4

# Fetch data + metadata for one indicator
uv run python scripts/heimsmarkmid.py get 1-1-1
uv run python scripts/heimsmarkmid.py get 16-b-1

The ZIP is fetched once and cached; metadata is fetched live on get (the open-sdg meta endpoint doesn't ship inside the ZIP).

Catalog schema

data/processed/heimsmarkmid_catalog.csv:

Column	Description
code	Indicator code (e.g. 1-1-1, 16-b-1)
goal	Leading SDG goal number (1–17)
target	Middle segment (numeric or single letter)
indicator	Final segment of the code
columns	|-separated disaggregation columns (excluding Year, Value)
n_rows	Number of data rows in the CSV
first_year, last_year	Range of years present (empty when no numeric rows)

Data-file schema

Every /is/data/{code}.csv has:

Column	Meaning
Year	Calendar year (integer)
<disaggregations>	Zero or more columns (Kyn, Aldur, Svæði, etc.); empty value = "Total"
Value	Numeric measurement in the unit declared in the meta file

Unit is in meta.computation_units — common values are Hundraðshlutar (%), Fjöldi, krónur. Units can vary within a single CSV if an indicator publishes multiple measurement series side-by-side (see 4-1-1 where the Units column differentiates reading vs. maths proficiency).

Goal coverage (2026-04 snapshot)

Goal	Indicators	Total rows
1 · No poverty	9	856
2 · Zero hunger	7	124
3 · Good health	22	1,187
4 · Quality education	9	519
5 · Gender equality	7	491
6 · Clean water	8	48
7 · Clean energy	6	353
8 · Decent work	10	2,453
9 · Industry/infrastructure	6	1,458
10 · Reduced inequalities	5	267
11 · Sustainable cities	9	324
12 · Responsible consumption	8	595
13 · Climate action	2	958
14 · Life below water	2	6
15 · Life on land	7	94
16 · Peace & institutions	10	267
17 · Partnerships	10	338
Total	137	~10,338

Caveats

1. Reporting gaps are normal. Some indicators have n_rows=0 — they're listed in the national framework but Iceland hasn't reported yet. Others have a single row (e.g. 4-a-1 has 2 rows, one per survey year).
2. Disaggregation columns differ per indicator. Don't assume a common schema across files — always join by code via the catalog, or inspect the header before parsing.
3. "Total" rows use empty disaggregation cells. When you need the headline series without breakdowns, filter rows where all disaggregation columns are empty — or use /is/headline/{code}.csv directly.
4. Rows can duplicate across years with different units. 4-1-1 reports both reading and maths proficiency in the same file, with a Tegund færni discriminator. Always disambiguate with the full key (Year, *disaggregations) before aggregating.
5. Meta is English-labelled even on the /is/ tree. Field keys (indicator_name, graph_title) stay in English; only the values are translated.
6. The data repo is rebuilt nightly. If you're caching the ZIP, re-download with fetch --force when you need fresh values — the script does not compare timestamps for you.
7. Overlap with velsaeldarvisar. About a dozen indicators (low-income share, gender gap, unemployment) appear in both publications but with different dimensional breakdowns. The SDG version follows UN methodology; the velsaeldarvísar version follows Eurostat/OECD.
8. Encoding. GitHub Pages serves all CSV/JSON/YAML as UTF-8. Icelandic chars appear in indicator titles, units (Hundraðshlutar, krónur), and disaggregation labels. Read with encoding="utf-8" and write JSON with ensure_ascii=False.

Attribution

"Byggir á upplýsingum frá Hagstofu Íslands (landsvísar fyrir heimsmarkmið)."

Related

• velsaeldarvisar — Hagstofa's wellbeing/social/cultural indicator portal. Separate content, partial thematic overlap.
• hagstofan — many SDG indicators are re-computations over PX-Web tables reachable here.