The SDGs are a collection of 17 goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 and are a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” They include universally agreeable, if ambitious in number and scope, goals that include eliminating poverty, achieving good health and well-being, and protecting life on land. To monitor the SDGs, each has several targets. And each target has between 1 – 3 indicators. Find plenty of detail here.

OpenStreetMap can be used to monitor progress towards these goals.

This talk will present a broad overview of SDGs. There will be an emphasis on SDGs that can be monitored from space / have a geospatial component. According to a report from Committee on Earth Observations Satellites CEOS, Earth Imagery and geospatial data has the potential to support national reporting on a quarter of the SDG targets.

Then I will go into some technical details of how the GeoTrellis team at Azavea calculated SDG indicator 9.1.1: Proportion of the rural population who live within 2 km of an all-season road using OpenStreetMap and publicly available population data from WorldPop and NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (sedac) using GeoTrellis. We create a global set of Vector Tiles from the OpenStreetMap road data and then calculate the percentage of the population that lives within 2km of those roads by country for the world. This work is ongoing and our hope is that it will eventually be a useful tool for transportation planning.

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