Big Earth Data facilitates the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

-An Interpretation of the 2020 report on "Big Earth Data in Support of the Sustainable Development Goals"

In September 2015, President Xi Jinping and other heads of state and representatives adopted the "Transforming Our World: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development", when attending the UN Sustainable Development Summit. The 2030 Agenda includes 17 goals, aiming to embark on the path of sustainable development and promoting balanced development in social, economic and environmental areas. Now, with only 10 years remaining before the 2030 deadline, the international community is fully aware of the several difficulties in achieving the SDGs at the current rate. The COVID-19 pandemic has also presented an unprecedented challenge to the 2030 Agenda.

Monitoring and evaluating progress is crucial to implementing SDGs. To establish a quantifiable, comparable, and localized indicator system is important to facilitate research and application of relevant policies, evaluate progress on sustainable development, guide formulation of relevant policy and ensure the realization of SDGs. Judging from the progress of global SDGs target monitoring and assessment, the problems are beyond the scope of traditional statistical methods and conventional observation methods. Big Earth Data, which integrates the characteristics of massive, multi-source, heterogeneous, multi-temporal, multi-dimensional, highly coupled, non-stationary, and unstructured, is a new engine for in-depth understanding of the earth and scientific discovery, which has great potential and practical value for SDGs monitoring and reporting.

Facing the above-mentioned problems, The CAS Big Earth Data Science Engineering Program (CASEarth) has conducted in-depth research and has achieved important results. On September 26, the Big Earth Data in Support of the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020 was released at the High-level Video Conference on Poverty Eradication and South-South Cooperation chaired by Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. This is the second time in two consecutive years (2019 and 2020) that this report has been submitted as an official document of the Chinese government at the United Nations (74th and 75th) General Assembly, which were warmly welcomed by the international community.

The report presents dynamic, quantitative and spatial monitoring and reporting of SDGs indicators at local, national, regional and global scales, and provides systematic solutions in the form of data products, method models and decision making related to SDGs. This series of reports demonstrated the innovation and practice of Big Earth Data on supporting the global implementation of the 2030 Agenda, and showcased the application value and prospects of technological innovation in promoting the realization of SDGs.

The highlights of the report are as follows: 1) Using Big Earth Data to evaluate the progress of China's SDGs including: for SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), it was found that from 2000 to 2019, the overall clarity of lake water bodies in China performed well and showed a continued trend of improvement; for SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), it was found that since 1990, the ratio of utilization rate to population growth rate in 434 China cities have risen; for SDG 14 (Life Below Water), it was found that the abundance of floating garbage in China's offshore waters in 2018 was about 25% lower than the average value from 2010 to 2014; for SDG 15 (Life on Land), it was found that China had achieved Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) in advance; 2) Highlight the achievements of China's ecological civilization. In terms of wetland ecosystem protection and restoration, the report found that China mangrove forest area has increased by 22.11% from 2015 to 2018, and ecological restoration and governance have achieved remarkable results. In terms of land degradation governance, it is found that the LDN trend from 2015 to 2018 in China is positive, accounting for about 1/5 of the global net land restoration area. 3) SDGs indicators system is refined with the help of Big Earth Data. For example, in response to the process of urbanization in China, the report puts forward a new evaluation index of "the ratio between economic growth rate and land use rate"; in response to land degradation, the report puts forward a LDN reporting system, elaborating from the proportion of degradation area to LDN; for the protection of endangered species, the report point out that it is unreasonable to reduce the endangered level of giant pandas from endangered to vulnerable based on population size alone, the assessment of endangered species requires both population and habitat information; 4) The innovative advantages of Big Earth Data in SDGs monitoring and evaluation are fully demonstrated. For example, in the case of global/regional forest cover, the data volume was as high as 60 TB, and the number of training sample points were as high as 61,653, but the production time is only 2-3 days. The urbanization monitoring and evaluation case processes millions scenes of satellite data simultaneously in order to generation high accuracy data product for SDG 11.3.1.

Science, technology and innovation is crucial to promoting sustainable development.Under the increasingly severe constraints of resource and environment, there is an urgent need to effectively observe and understand the changing patterns of the earth system and reveal the relationship between human and land, thus to adopt more effective scientific solutions to achieve harmonious development. In the future, it is hoped that the Chinese Academy of Sciences will make full use of the existing basis of CASEarth project, strengthen extensive collaboration with related institutions and departments at home and abroad, and further contribute to the realization of SDGs driven by technological innovation, thus to provide key knowledge and technical support in achieving a balance development among economic, social and environmental aspects and implementing the 2030 Agenda.

The author is president of the Ecological Society of China and director of the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, CAS.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.