Last September, urged on by Pope Francis, the United Nations and its 193 member states embraced the most sweeping quest yet to, basically, save the world and everyone in it — dubbed the Sustainable Development Goals. It’s a global agenda to fix climate change, stop hunger, end poverty, extend health and access to jobs, and vastly more — all by 2030.

The goals comprise no less than 17 separate items and 169 “targets” within them. And this isn’t just an airy exercise — the targets are quite specific (“By 2030, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40 per cent of the population at a rate higher than the national average”). That means that at least in many cases, countries can actually be measured on how they’re faring in meeting these goals, based on a large range of sociological, economic and other indicators.

“In the global context, the idea that we should be both measuring and aiming for economic, social, and environmental goals simultaneously, a kind of triple bottom line, has become more and more a worldwide accepted idea,” said Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist and U.N. adviser who has been closely involved in the goals and heads the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.  That’s even though, as Sachs points out, here in the U.S. we barely discuss or acknowledge the goals.

When it comes to sticking that “triple bottom line,” not all countries are faring very well at the moment. That’s the gist of a new report from Bertelsmann Stiftung, a large German foundation, and Sachs’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which has actually ranked the countries of the world based on where they stand at the outset of trying to achieve these goals over the next decade and a half.

“What we’ve done in this report is a first scan of about 150 countries,” Sachs said. “It’s the first time anybody has taken a look across the world.” A hundred and ninety-three U.N. member countries endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals, but there wasn’t enough data to include all of them at this point.

Based on the data available, though, the report finds that Scandinavian countries — Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland — win the honors. Sweden was already “84.5 percent of the way to the best possible outcome across the 17 [Sustainable Development Goals],” the report found, ranking number one in the world – and receiving a corresponding score of 84.5. The other three Scandinavian nations then filled out the top four slots, followed by many European nations.