Ana Andries
My research project
Translation of remote sensing data into sustainable development indicators
The purpose of this study is to critically analyze the potential of Earth Observation (EO) to populate the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators and how satellites data can have considerable impact, for instance, delivering measurements and evaluation of progress towards SDGs.
In 2015, member countries of the United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York with a main key feature in their post- agenda: ‘Leave no one behind’. These goals have 169 targets and 232 indicators which are based on the three pylons of sustainable development: economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability.
Data plays an important role in achieving the goals by 2030; to create new indicators and targets, and monitor the state of the countries. However, there are still gaps and challenges in obtaining data, especially in developing countries. One innovative way to fill the gaps is to use, earth observation.
The benefits of using satellites imagery are immense offering a wide variety of applications including measuring the land use change, managing the impact of natural disasters, monitoring the atmosphere and climate change.
Earth observation (from satellite, airborne, and in-situ sensors) provides accurate and reliable information on the state of the ecosystems and their changes over the time; significantly reduce the traditional monitoring cost, great accessibility (e.g. Sentinels), spatial coverage of measurements, availability (spatially, temporally and thematically), useful in places with poor data. But there are also challenges involved with using earth observation to populate indicators, especially with the more social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. Selected indicators and targets for several of the goals such as SDG-2, SDG-3, SDG-11, SDG-13, SDG-14, SDG-15 can be directly helped in part by using satellite remote sensing. To coordinate provision key earth observation variables to countries and the UN for monitoring the progress towards achieving the goals, agencies of the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) are working closely with the Group on Earth Observation (GEO).
Supervisors
My publications
Publications
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 often limited resources available. 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 develop a novel analytical framework for assessing the potential of EO approaches to populate the SDG indicators. We present a Maturity Matrix Framework (MMF) and apply it to all of the 232 SDG indicators. The results demonstrate that while the applicability of EO-derived data does vary between the SDG indicators, overall, EO has an important contribution to make towards populating a wide diversity of the SDG 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.
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 based on the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. However, substantial challenges remain in obtaining data of the required quality and quantity to populate these indicators efficiently. One promising and innovative way of addressing this issue is to use Earth observation (EO). The research reported here updates our original work to develop a Maturity Matrix Framework (MMF) for assessing the suitability of EO-derived data for populating the SDG indicators, with a special focus on those indicators covering the more social and economic dimensions of sustainable development, as these have been under-explored in terms of the contribution that can be made by EO. The advanced MMF 2.0 framework set out in this paper is based on a wide consultation with EO and indicator experts (semi-structured interviews with 38 respondents). This paper provides detail of the evolved structure of MMF 2.0 and illustrates its use for one of the SDG indicators (Indicator 11.1.1). The revised MMF is then applied to published work covering the full suite of SDG indicators and demonstrates that EO can make an important contribution to providing data relevant to a substantial number of the SDG indicators.