Translation of Remote Sensing data into Sustainable Development Indicators

In 2015, member countries of the United Nations adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York. These global goals have 169 targets and 232 indicators which are based on the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. Substantial challenges remain in obtaining data of the required quality, especially in developing countries, given the limited resources involved. One promising and innovative way of addressing this issue of data availability is to use Earth Observation (EO). This paper presents the results of research to analyse and optimise the potential of EO approaches to populate the SDG indicators and targets. We present a matrix of EO technologies with respect to the full set of current SDG indicators which shows the potential for direct or proxy calibrations across the span of the social, economic and environmental SDG indicators. We have focussed particularly on those SDG indicators covering the social and economic dimensions of sustainable development as these are relatively unexplored from an EO context. Results suggest that EO can make an important contribution towards populating the SDG indicators, but there is a spectrum from at one end the sole use of EO to the other end where the EO derived data have to be used in concert with data collected via non-EO means (surveys etc.). Complicating factors also include the lack of driving force and pressure indicators in the SDG framework and the use of ‘proxy’ indicators not part of the SDG framework but more amenable to EO-derived assessment. The next phase of the research will involve the presenting of these ideas to experts in the EO and indicator arenas for their assessment