Digital Earth for Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Sustainable development is nothing new, but it has proven notoriously difficult to implement in practice. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with 17 goals, 169 targets and 232 associated indicators, was approved at the 2015 UN General Assembly and addresses the economic, social and environmental pillars of development, aspiring to attain by 2030 a sustainable future that balances equitable prosperity within planetary boundaries. While the goals are universal (i.e., applicable to both developing and developed countries), it is left to individual countries to establish national Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets according to their own priorities and level of ambition in terms of the scale and pace of transformation aspired to. Keywords Sustainable development goals • Digital Earth • Earth Observation • Big Earth data • Indicators • Land cover classification 13.1 Fundamentals of Digital Earth for the Sustainable Development Goals The Digital Earth (DE) exists in parallel to the physical Earth along with some translating elements between them (Sudmanns et al. 2019). Chapter 1 describes the origin, evolution and main elements of Digital Earth, and the links between Digital Earth, Big Data (Chap. 9) and big Earth data. Guo (2017) argues that, from the perspective of big data, big Earth data inherits big data's 'Vs' (volume, velocity and

The COVID-19 Pandemic as an Opportunity to Foster the Sustainable Development of Teaching in Higher Education

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Drying conditions in Switzerland – indication from a 35-year Landsat time-series analysis of vegetation water content estimates to support SDGs

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Big Data and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) at a Glance

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