Intro
Our World Today
We all know that we face big challenges in today’s world: poverty, hunger, inequality, and climate change are just some of the issues to be addressed urgently (The Global Goals, n.d.).
Click to read about immense challenges we are facing (United Nations (UN) 2015)
- Billions of our citizens continue to live in poverty and are denied a life of dignity.
- There are rising inequalities within and among countries.
- There are enormous disparities in opportunity, wealth and power.
- Gender inequality remains a key challenge.
- Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, is a major concern.
- Global health threats, more frequent and intense natural disasters, spiralling conflict, violent extremism, terrorism and related humanitarian crises and forced displacement of people threaten to reverse much of the development progress made in recent decades.
- Natural resource depletion and adverse impacts of environmental degradation, including desertification, drought, land degradation, freshwater scarcity and loss of biodiversity, add to and exacerbate the list of challenges that humanity faces.
- Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development. Increases in global temperature, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and other climate change impacts are seriously affecting coastal areas and low-lying coastal countries, including many least-developed countries and small island developing States.
- The survival of many societies, and the biological support systems of the planet, is at risk (United Nations (UN), 2015).
With significant population growth and displacement over the last century, our development and consumption patterns are fundamentally becoming unsustainable, with increasingly significant environmental, social, economic, and political consequences.
Carefully planned strategies for sustainable development to use resources more efficiently, taking into account both immediate and long-term benefits for our planet and its inhabitants are essential.
Sustainable development is described as a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, and it is the overarching paradigm of the United Nations (UN).
Big challenges need bold actions to overcome them!
This is where the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals come in play.
2030 Agenda for sustainable Development
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals aiming at ensuring by 2030 a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable future for all.
The goals were adopted by all UN Member States in 2015, as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which set out a 15-year plan to achieve the Goals.
Building on the lessons of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals which ended in 2015, the new set of goals, the SDGs were developed in the Post-2015 Development Agenda as the future global development framework.
Leave no one behind!
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets out a vision for sustainable development grounded in international human rights standards, putting equality and non-discrimination at the centre of its efforts and encompassing not only economic and social rights but also civil, political, and cultural rights, and the right to development.
This vision is condensed into three Universal Values (UN Sustainable Development Group n.y.):
To operationalise these three guiding principles, the UN adopts the following four approaches:
The SDGs are a universal call to action to end poverty and suffering and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere, by adopting strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
The 17 SDGs are interlinked to each other, implying that action in one goal will affect outcomes in others. The development must balance social, economic, and environmental sustainability. For instance, ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities while tackling climate change and environmental protection.
We all have a role in achieving the goals!
What are the SDGs?
Get to know each of the goals (UN ):
Visit the UN’s Websites for further information about the Sustainable Development Goals!
Here you candownload SDG Progress Reports and Global Sustainable Development Reports!
Targets and Indicators
As highlighted in the UN’s 2014 report ‚ Development one of the key lessons from the review of the MDGs is the recognition of the indispensable role of data in sustainable development to be able to effectively track and monitor progress consistently and comparably.
The 2030 Agenda process sought to learn from this experience and has resulted in the definition of 17 SDGs. The SDGs will inform how countries and the international community will measure, manage, monitor progress, and communicate economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, as the pillars of sustainable development.
Each goal includes Targets and Indicators. Targets refer to the specific conditions that must be met to achieve the relevant goal. 17 SDGs are defined in a list of 169 Targets. Indicators are tools employed to measure the concrete progress toward the SDG targets. 232 Indicators are used to track the progress towards targets.
Effective reporting of progress toward these Indicators will require the use of multiple types of data, both what we have in hand – traditional national accounts, household surveys and routine administrative data – and new sources of data outside national statistical systems, notably Earth observations (EO) and geospatial information (GI), using modern data processing techniques more appropriate to large volumes of EO data. The integration of all these data can produce a quantum leap in how we monitor and track development and advance the well-being of our societies (GEO, n.d.-a).
Global Indicator Framework
In support of the measurement and monitoring of progress toward the 17 SDGs, the UN has established a Global Indicator Framework, designed around 232 SDG Indicators.
These Indicators represent how national governments can practically monitor achievement, and report progress toward, each of the 169 Targets of the 2030 Agenda (Paganini et al., 2018).
The Global Indicator Framework will be the basis for the routine annual reporting of progress towards the SDGs at the High-Level Political Forum each year (Paganini et al., 2018).
Tier Classification for the SDG indicators (Paganini et al., 2018)
To establish a sense of priority for implementation and of the scale of the task ahead about the availability of new data and new methodologies, the Inter-Agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) was created by the UN Statistical Commission to develop and implement the SDG Global Indicator Framework, developed a tier classification system, based on the level of methodological development and overall data availability
- Tier 1 for Indicators that are conceptually clear, have established methodologies, standards are available and data are regularly produced by countries (at least 50 percent of countries and of the population in every region where the Indicator is relevant).
- Tier 2 for Indicators that are conceptually clear, have established methodologies, and standards are available but data are not regularly produced by countries.
- Tier 3 for Indicators for which there are no established methodologies and standards or methodology/standards are being developed/tested.
Key Players
What is increasingly important is the collaboration among local, regional and national stakeholders with interdisciplinary, public-private, socio-economic and environmental partnerships. On the international scale, many global entities are helping to define and collect data for the 2030 Agenda.
The UN provides leadership as it encourages other international entities and individual nations to take action. Recognizing the scale of the challenge in ensuring appropriate methodologies, data availability, and consistent and comparable reporting by countries, the UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG indicators (IAEG-SDGs), a working group of the UN Statistical Commission, has appointed a “Custodian Agency” and further agencies to each SDG Indicator relevant to their area of expertise.
These Custodian Agencies have the mandate to (Paganini et al., 2018):
- compile monitoring guidelines for measuring and reporting on the Indicators
- support countries in their implementation and strengthen national statistical capacities
- collect national data for the global reporting mechanism.
The UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) produces an annual report on progress toward the SDGs; custodian agencies contribute towards the storyline for this global report (GEO, n.d.-b).
Further, the IAEG-SDGs has formed three working groups to address areas relevant to SDG indicator implementation, including a Working Group on Geospatial Information (WGGI) , which aims to ensure from a statistical and geospatial perspective that the principle of ‘leaving no one behind’ is reflected in the Global Indicator Framework (GEO, n.d.-b).
How is the Progress towards achieving SDGs?
The world was already off track in realizing the ambitions and fulfilling the commitments of the 2030 Agenda, even before COVID-19. As the pandemic continues to unfold, it is also magnifying deeply rooted problems: food insecurity, insufficient social protection, weak public health systems and inadequate health coverage, structural inequalities, environmental degradation and climate change. It is a crisis as well as an opportunity to make the transformations needed to deliver on the promise of the 2030 Agenda (UN, 2021).
Check the Sustainable Development Goals Progress Chart 2021 to have a snapshot of global and regional progress towards selected targets under the 17 Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Further reading
Earth Observation for Sustainable Development
EO (from satellite, airborne and in-situ sensors) provide accurate and reliable information on the state of the atmosphere, oceans, coasts, rivers, soil, crops, forests, ecosystems, natural resources, ice, snow and built infrastructure, as well as their change over time. These observations are directly or indirectly necessary for all functions of government, all economic sectors and many day-to-day activities of the society. Effective use of the information from satellite observations can have a transformational impact on many of humanity’s most significant challenges, such as helping monitor and protect fragile ecosystems, ensuring resilient infrastructure, managing climate risks and public health, enhancing food security, building more resilient cities, reduce poverty, and improve governance, among others.
Key benefits of satellite Earth observation data for the SDGs:
- Satellite Earth observation data makes the prospect of a Global Indicator Framework for the SDGs viable. For many Indicators, the coverage and frequency of measurements from which the Indicators are derived would simply not be feasible, technically or financially if satellite observations are not used;
- the potential to allow more timely statistical outputs, to reduce the frequency of surveys, to reduce respondent burden and other costs and to provide data at a more disaggregated level for informed decision-making;
- improved accuracy in reporting by ensuring that data are more spatially-explicit and directly contribute to informing the Targets and Indicators, helping to augment statistical data, validating national statistics, and providing disaggregation and granularity of the indicators (where relevant, by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability and geographic location, in support of the principle of leaving no one behind). Satellite data can support the evolution from traditional statistical approaches to more measurement-based solutions as some challenges, including those about the environment and human populations, become more pressing, and with the need for more accurate, spatially explicit, and frequently updated (Paganini et al., 2018).
Satellite Data Characteristics
There are many different EO satellites in operation with different data characteristics providing variable information at different scales, accordingly the uptake of satellite data by UN agencies is increasing.
Source: Satellite Earth Observation in support of the Sustainable DevelopmentGoals (Paganini et al., 2018)
Role of EO for SDGs
The GEO/CEOS study suggests that EO data has a role to play in most of the 17 SDGs. More specifically, around 40 of the 169 Targets (representing about a quarter) and around 30 of the 232 Indicators (about an eighth) are supported.
It is particularly telling that of these approximately 30 Indicators, only 12 are identified as being Tier I Indicators (with established methodologies and regular data production by countries) where we might reasonably assume significant exploitation of EO data currently. This means there remains significant unrealised potential for EO data to contribute to the Indicator Framework, with only a third of its potential routinely being exploited today (Paganini et al., 2018).
An analysis by GEO and CEOS has identified specific Targets and Indicators that can be supported by Earth observations. An overview of the relationship between targets and basic application areas, and summarised in the below figure: