Facilitating Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals through Open Scientific Data and Indicators

Abstract:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an unprecedented international commitment to a shared future encompassing sustainable management of the planet and significant improvement in the human condition around the world. The scientific community has both an ethical responsibility and substantial self-interest—as residents of this planet—to help the world community to better understand the complex, interlinked behavior of human and environmental systems and to elucidate pathways to achieve long-term sustainability. Critical to making progress towards the SDGs is the open availability of timely, reliable, usable, and well integrated data and indicators relevant to all SDGs and associated targets. Such data and indicators will not only be valuable in monitoring and evaluation of progress, but also in developing policies and making decisions on environmental and societal issues affecting sustainability from local to global scales. The open availability of such data and indicators can help motivate performance, promote accountability, and facilitate cooperation.

A range of scientific, technical, organizational, political, and resource challenges need to be addressed in developing a coherent SDG monitoring and indicator framework. For example, assembling and integrating diverse data on consistent spatial and temporal scales across the relevant natural, social, health, and engineering sciences pose both scientific and technical difficulties, and may require new ways to interlink and organize existing cyberinfrastructure, reconcile different data policy regimes, and fund integration efforts. New information technologies promise more timely and efficient ways of collecting many types of data, but may also raise privacy, control, and equity issues. Scientific review processes to ensure data quality need to be coordinated with the types of quality control and review employed by national statistical agencies for trusted economic and social statistics. Although large investments are already being made in some observing systems such as satellite-based remote sensing, additional resources are needed to fill key gaps, make data useful for decision making, and build capacity in developing countries. Broad engagement by the scientific community is urgently needed.