GEO4SDGs: Relevance to the digital age
Background
It has been a long time since the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 first came up. In 2015, the United Nations along with its member states embraced it. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 169 associated targets have been decided to strike a balance and integrate the three core dimensions of sustainable development namely, social, economic and environmental. The 2030 Agenda’s integrated approach to global problems ushered in a new era in thinking about sustainable development, including requirement of innovative approaches to collect and integrate data as the basis for evidence-based decision making. Importantly, the 2030 Agenda recognised the need for “high quality, timely, reliable and disaggregated data, including earth observations and geospatial information” to address development challenges.
Geospatial and location based information is increasingly becoming a key part of this pervasive digital world of transformation and innovation trends, changing many business practices, providing new technological applications and bringing about a data revolution that is having a positive influence on social and economic systems. Continuous innovations in technologies such as UAVs, sensors, satellites, big data, etc. are further enabling the use of geospatial not only towards achieving the agenda, but more crucially in measuring, monitoring and reporting the progress as well.
Objectives
- Deliberate on using geo-information to accelerate Agenda 2030 and bridge the gap between the geospatial community, the policy makers and the pursuers of the sustainable development goals.
- Platform for sharing knowledge on innovations and integration of geospatial data to achieve the sustainable development agenda in a holistic manner.
- Enable collaboration among government agencies, commercial sectors, multilateral and international development organizations and the civil society.