Concordance
“sustainable development” in the General Debate
9,474 uses across 40 years of statements. First recorded in 1986; used most in 2016, when it appeared 848 times across 182 statements by 182 speakers.
What this counts, and what it does not. This is
the number of times the string sustainable development appears in the
text of General Debate statements, matched on word boundaries and ignoring
case. It is a fact about a word. It is not a measure of how much any
state cared about the subject, what position it took, or whether it meant it
— and nothing on this page should be read that way.
The final year of this series is machine-transcribed from the official simultaneous interpretation rather than taken from a UN transcript, so it counts what a transcriber heard. See session 80.
Used most by
| Speaker | Uses | Statements | First | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trinidad and Tobago | 151 | 26 | 1989 | 2024 |
| Tajikistan | 150 | 29 | 1993 | 2025 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 135 | 27 | 1996 | 2025 |
| Barbados | 108 | 29 | 1988 | 2023 |
| Tuvalu | 105 | 23 | 2001 | 2025 |
| Tonga | 105 | 21 | 2001 | 2025 |
| Botswana | 103 | 23 | 1991 | 2025 |
| Solomon Islands | 101 | 30 | 1991 | 2025 |
| Federated States of Micronesia | 99 | 29 | 1992 | 2024 |
| Saint Kitts and Nevis | 97 | 28 | 1990 | 2025 |
| Papua New Guinea | 93 | 28 | 1994 | 2025 |
| Eswatini | 93 | 24 | 1993 | 2025 |
| Mozambique | 90 | 28 | 1992 | 2025 |
| Kiribati | 89 | 19 | 2003 | 2025 |
| Grenada | 88 | 25 | 1992 | 2025 |
| Vanuatu | 87 | 19 | 1992 | 2024 |
| Thailand | 86 | 24 | 1993 | 2025 |
| Samoa | 85 | 27 | 1988 | 2025 |
| Saint Lucia | 80 | 29 | 1991 | 2025 |
| Monaco | 78 | 22 | 1996 | 2024 |
| Finland | 78 | 33 | 1987 | 2025 |
| Norway | 78 | 29 | 1986 | 2025 |
| Laos | 76 | 18 | 2002 | 2025 |
| San Marino | 76 | 15 | 1999 | 2025 |
| Guyana | 75 | 26 | 1990 | 2025 |
A state that speaks every year has more chances to use a word than one admitted in 2011, and a state whose statements are longer has more again. These are counts, not rates.