Working Groups
Co-Chairs:
Lixia Chu (Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands, lixia.chu@wur.nl)
Hiromichi Fukui (Chubu University, Japan, fukui@isc.chubu.ac.jp)
Gregory Giuliani (University of Geneva, Switzerland, gregory.giuliani@unepgrid.ch)
Members:
Venkata Ravibabu Mandla (National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR), Ministry of Rural Development, India)
Le Yu (Tsinghua University, China)
Til Prasad Pangali Sharma (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
Tikunov Vladimir (Lomonosov Moscow University, Russia)
Yubao Qiu (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
Jining Yan (China University of Geosciences, China)
Fei Zhang (Xinjiang University, China)
Muhammad Shakir (Institute of Space Technology IST Islamabad, Pakistan)
M.Surabuddin Mondal (Wollega University, India)
Vishal Mishra (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India)
1. Scope
The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015, is a universal development agenda for all countries with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), 169 targets and 232 associated indicators. It aims to address the economic, social and environmental aspects to achieve a balance between the exploitation of natural resources for socio-economic development, and conserving ecosystem services that are critical to everyone’ s wellbeing and livelihoods. This policy framework enables countries to define, measure and monitor progresses towards sustainable development.
Digital Earth can play an insightful role to provide the necessary basis for reliable and accountable scientific understanding and knowledge to support informed decisions and evidence-based policy advices. It can help integrating different datasets (e.g., demographic, statistical data) describing the three dimensions of sustainability to adequately characterize a given location (economic, social, and environmental). It allows monitoring and assessing conditions and progresses at different scales (e.g., sub-national, national, regional, global), understanding interactions between various systems (e.g., atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere), and model future changes. Consequently, Information Technology can play a significant role (i.e., Digital Transformation) to leverage modern analytics and modelling technologies (e.g., Big Data, Artificial Intelligence) and generate, in a consistent and standardized manner, the required and accountable knowledge for decision-makers.
2. Objectives and Methodology
WG6 is aiming to act as a forum to increase our understanding on the potential and limitations of Digital Earth for systematic generation of information and knowledge to measure progress towards SDGs.
A particular attention will be paid on (1) not duplicating the work that is already done by other groups/activities (e.g., EO4SDG) but instead aims at creating synergies and facilitate integration. (2) consider/cover different data sources/types (not only geospatial but also socio-economic, …)
In particular, the working group will explore the following priorities for implementation:
(1) the design of SDG indicator metrics at national levels and how Digital Earth can contribute to that end;
(2) harmonized national metrics for SDG implementation, including for baseline determination and target setting;
(3) setting up monitoring platforms for tracking progress towards the SDGs;
(4) knowledge needs for assessing implementation of actions and strategies towards achieving set SDG targets;
(5) governance and institutional arrangements, including multi-stakeholder participation.
3. Activities
(1) We will organize a session "Digital Earth: A platform for the SDGs and green transformation at the global and local level, employing essential SDGs variables" for the 2022 DE summit.
(2) Our group would like to contribute to the Digital Earth vision papers.
(3) We will submit the scientific paper based on the outcomes of the 12th ISDE Symposium session.
(4) We will define the State of Play in the field of DE and SDGs through a survey to identify the key activities of the WG (to avoid overlaps with other existing activities related to SDGs).
(5) We are going to engage with relevant contributors/stakeholders, identify relevant case studies/develop demonstrators on DE, elaborate best practices/guidance of the use of the DE technologies, and develop synergies with other WGs.
