Measuring regional progress towards SDGs by combining geospatial and statistical information

doi:10.11947/j.AGCS.2019.20180563

Abstract

Abstract: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the Transform our World:2030 Agenda for Sustainable Develepment represents a new coherent way of embracing economic prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental protection as an "indivisible whole". In order to ensure the implementation of this global agenda, the United Nations had proposed a systematic follow-up and review through indicators-based tracking and reporting of the progress with statistical and geospatial information towards SDGs at national, regional and global levels. This has posed many technical and coordination challenges, such as selection of appropriate indicators for a given nation or sub-nation regions, availability and acquisition of reliable data sets, spatio-temporal analysis with a geographical perspective, interaction between SDGs and cross-sector coordination. Although the international society has devoted great attention to this hot topic, most of them remain on the conceptual design and preliminary testing. There are very few good practices for a comprehensive measurement and assessment of progress towards SDGs with integration of statistical and geospatial information at nation or sub-national level. This paper presents the methodology and results of a pioneer project which measured the progress towards SDGs at a county level in China by combining integration of statistical and geospatial information. The major conclusions are ① the comprehensive progress towards SDGs in an entire administrative region can best be measured and assessed by integrating geospatial and statistical information; ② the Deqing county 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 and further actions on better supporting SDGs with geospatial information.

Key words: 2030 agenda, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), geospatial information, indicators, measurement

CLC Number:

P208

CHEN Jun, PENG Shu, ZHAO Xuesheng, GE Yuejing, LI Zhilin. Measuring regional progress towards SDGs by combining geospatial and statistical information[J]. Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica, 2019, 48(4): 473-479.

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