Accelerating sustainable development with the help of Big Data and AI

The researchers in this project want to use Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate the achievement of the sustainable development goals set out in UN Agenda 2030.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intended to help resolve the major challenges we face poverty, hunger, inequality, climate change, and health. Even though seven of the 15 years to achieve the goals have elapsed, major challenges still remain. There is a shortage of data, monitoring, interlinking, and analysis of the 169 goals and 231 indicators that are intended to inform politicians and other decision makers.

The researchers in this project consider the solution to be combining official statistics used for SDG reporting with unofficial and alternative new data sources and methods.

Only 41.4 percent of the SDGs indicators have data in the African countries. In Asia (Bangladesh), data is missing for 121 of the 169 targets. The situation is also critical in developed countries. Finland, which was one of the first countries to collect data on SDG indicators, is missing about 47 percent of the data.

Moreover, there exists limited analysis for the environmental goals (SDGs13–15) and the institutional/governance goals (SDGs16–17). The researchers consider that this shortcoming must be addressed by building digital ecosystems and improved analysis by exploring other forms of data such as citizen science, satellite data, remote analysis etc.

The project team will therefore be using Big Data and AI to supply alternative data and analytical capability for tracing, monitoring, and predicting progress and interlinkages between the SDG indicators.

The first two research goals of this interdisciplinary project is to focus on Big Data to fill in the data gaps in the SDG indicators, particularly environmental, climate change (SDGs 13-15) and institutional/governance SDGs (SDGs 16-17) and identify the interlinkages between the different SDGs. The third objective is to interpret our results for implementable policy solutions for achieving sustainable development.

The project will be carried out in ongoing research collaboration with the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan; the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, China; the Danish Institute for Human Rights; the Swedish Environmental Institute; and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT).