A Comprehensive Measurement of Progress toward Local SDGs with Geospatial Information: Methodology and Lessons Learned

Jun Chen,Shu Peng,Zhilin Li,Hao Chen,Xuesheng Zhao,Yuejing Ge

doi:10.3390/ijgi9090522

Abstract

The UN’s 2030 Agenda defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to ensure the implementation of this global agenda, the UN proposed a systematic follow-up and review through indicator-based tracking and reporting of the progress with statistical and geospatial information toward SDGs at national, regional, and global levels. This has posed many technical and institutional challenges. Although international communities have devoted great attention to this hot topic, most of their work has focused on the conceptual design and preliminary testing. There are very few good practices for a comprehensive measurement and assessment of progress toward SDGs with the integration of statistical and geospatial information at national or local levels. This paper presents the methodology and results of a pioneer project which measured the progress toward SDGs at a local level in China (i.e., Deqing County) by integrating statistical and geospatial information. In this study, a number of technical/institutional issues have been tackled, such as the adoption of appropriate indicators at a local level, availability and acquisition of reliable data sets, and spatiotemporal analysis with a geographical perspective, interaction between SDGs and cross-sector coordination. The major conclusions are (a) the comprehensive progress toward SDGs in Deqing can be most appropriately measured and assessed by integrating geospatial and statistical information; (b) Deqing has made significant economic and social advances while maintaining a good ecological environment over the past few years. The results were released at the first United Nations World Geospatial Information Congress as a good practice and a live example to stimulate discussions.

Highlights

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development set up 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, aiming to end poverty and promote prosperity and people’s well-being while protecting the environment by 2030 at national, regional, and global levels [1]
In order to ensure successful implementation of this global agenda, the United Nations called upon a systematic follow-up and review of the progress toward SDGs [2,3] in accordance with a SDGs Global Indicator Framework [4], which was developed by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) [5]
The evaluation or assessment of each SDG will be facilitated through a focused analysis of these local targets with the help of the quantified indicators, and other spatio-temporal evidences, such as multi-temporal images and maps, local knowledge and experiences

Summary

Introduction

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (hereinafter referred to as the 2030 Agenda) set up 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, aiming to end poverty and promote prosperity and people’s well-being while protecting the environment by 2030 at national, regional, and global levels [1]. At global and regional levels, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) used statistical data from the World Bank database to assess SDGs baselines for 149 countries with reference to the SDG index and dashboards [10,11]. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA) measured the progress toward SDGs in 22 countries of the Arab region with the help of 20 years of statistical data [12]. There is a common problem associated with these studies, i.e., only making use of statistical data but not of geospatial information. This leads to difficulties in describing geographic patterns, revealing regional differences, and exploring spatiotemporal effects of SDGs practices, because many SDGs, targets, and indicators have a geographic nature

Results

Discussion

Conclusion