Sustainability is about protecting our world against the challenges of the climate crisis, but it’s also about making our world a sustainable and better place. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) address all aspects of a sustainable future with a target for completion by 2030. UN-Habitat, a United Nations agency, focuses on sustainable cities and communities, working closely with GIS specialist Esri. In today’s interview we learn how this works.
Anthony
My guests today are Carmelle Terborgh, lead account manager, nonprofit and global organizations at Esri who joins us from the US. Carmelle, welcome.
Esri
Carmelle Terborgh
Thank you very much Anthony. It's a pleasure to meet you today and join you for this important discussion. I'm the lead account manager supporting the United Nations here at Esri and I work with a number of different organisations. Everything from peacekeeping to the World Health Organisation to UNICEF. And today I'm really pleased to have our colleague here from UN Habitat as focusing on sustainable cities and communities is really important. We are pleased to support that effort.
Anthony
Welcome also to Dennis Mwaniki, who's joining us from Kenya. He's a spatial data expert in the data and analytics unit at UN Habitat, a United Nations agency. Dennis it’s good to have you with us.
UN-Habitat
Dennis Mwaniki
Thank you very much, Anthony, and it's great to be here today. I'm working with the data and analytics unit of UN-Habitat and I am in charge of the work on integration of geospatial information and observation in urban monitoring, with a specific focus on the SDGs and any open data reporting and monitoring.
SDG 11
Anthony
The theme of today's discussion is SDG 11, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #11, which aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. It does that by providing knowledge, policy, advice, technical assistance, and collaborative action to communities across the world. Dennis, I'd like to start by asking you how your work contributes to the achievement of this goal, this SDG 11, and then after that I'm going to move on to ask Carmelle to explain how she's working at Esri to support your project.
Dennis Mwaniki
Yeah, sure Anthony and thanks. First of all, the UN agency that is responsible for promoting sustainable cities and towns and also human settlements. This is important because SDG 11 is really about human settlements and the different kind of interventions and what is supposed to go into making cities and other human settlements sustainable. What we're doing is several things. One is we are the main custodial agency within the UN system for this goal, and the role of the custodial agency usually is to coordinate different activities, develop methods for measurement of each of the indicators, and progress towards the target. But also to support countries and cities to actually do the measurement and make recommendations on the specific interventions required for this. So at the UN we are arbitrarily working on this leadership role at the global level, but also working directly with the partners like Esri and many other organisations who are involved in supporting measurements, but also working directly with countries and cities to really ensure that the intervention and actions that are done respond directly to the requirements of the SDG 11 and the specific targets and their measurements through the indicators.
Anthony Day
Thank you. Carmelle, would you like to expand on your role and how you and your organisation are working with Dennis on this project?
Carmelle Terborgh
Certainly. We have probably about a 20 year history working with UN Habitat quite closely and making sure that geospatial information, analysis, and data integration and those types of activities are possible. Our technology, ArcGIS, helps enable cities with their urban planning, with their understanding of the urban structure, and making sure that the organisations that are planning and managing our cities and our human settlements are able to do so with a great deal of good data for data driven decision making and all. Esri has a strong commitment to supporting the UN and all of the Member States and making sure that we can achieve the SDGs. SDG 11 definitely hits near to our heart because we have a strong set of our users that really focus on local government and all the different applications and solutions that we can bring to bear to help make the cities and local governments more sustainable is really important to us. Some of the technologies that the UN Habitat and many of the cities use come from Esri, and we have a really strong commitment to making sure that we can help cities learn how to develop the SDG indicators data indicators that are needed and to be able to measure and monitor progress on SDG 11.
GIS
Anthony Day
Fine, you mentioned GIS geographic information systems. Now where are we getting the data from? Is this interpreting satellite data, or are we getting the data from a wider range of sources? Dennis, would you like to comment on that?
Dennis Mwaniki
Yes, definitely. Maybe I start by saying that we have within SDG 11 we have two broad types of requirements. We have indicators and measurements that require lots of status code data. Then we have those that require GIS observation related data, and the sources for these really vary a lot. We have, for example, a lot of details coming from satellite imagery and this again the variety for this is also pretty wide. We have the open-sourced Landsat Sentinel, but we also have very high resolution imagery in cases where this is not available. We also have geospatial volunteered spatial data that comes from communities and individuals really providing and producing this data. We have data that is mapped at the city scale or the national level. We have also map data coming from the national statistical system. The diversity really is a lot of the back of the data for the indicators. There are specific indicators within the framework that rely a lot on observation sense data or they rely heavily on on-site data that is collected as point information or from the ground or validated through ground trooping processes. So here it’s really a hybrid kind of data. We have different sources of data coming in and a lot of the details are also volunteered data. We are having a lot of data coming from Esri themselves, or the data they have been collecting and compiling over the years. We have data coming from many platforms like Open Street map, and even Google is also having a lot of data that is really useful for these for these measurements.
Earth Observation Toolkit
Anthony Day
Now, I've also come across something called the Earth Observation Toolkit. Is that something that Esri is developing, Carmelle?
Carmelle Terborgh
It's actually something that Dennis himself is developing, but on our ArcGIS hub technology and so we've been partnering with them for a couple of years. The UN Habitat created their data.unhabitat.org site using the same technology, and when the opportunity to partner with the Earth Observation for SDGs group within the group on earth observations, that organisation
wanted to build a toolkit to help municipal governments with these tasks to develop a number of the data indicators using earth observations. Satellite imagery could be airborne sensors. These types of things for looking at pollution and some of the other Earth observation types of options, but mostly they're looking at using satellite imagery for things like understanding land use and land cover, and a number of different tasks. So yes, we're trying to do our best to help with that, and to make sure that the toolkit itself is very accessible and available publicly so that all of the municipal governments around the world can use the capabilities and be able to have open data. The ArcGIS open data capability is there as well.
Anthony Day
Right, well Dennis, you're receiving all this data together and just to summarise your objective in a phrase, your aim is sustainable communities. Within that, it strikes me that you'll have both social and physical dimensions. On the one hand, are you using the data to look at Disaster Risk Reduction, like flooding; perhaps at sustainable transport and the effects of climate change, and on the other hand, are you also using this data to look at the demographic aspect - population levels, education needs, and things like that? Tell us a bit more about how what you're actually doing with the data.
Dennis Mwaniki
First just to add onto what Carmelle was saying about the toolkit itself. This toolkit is really a contributed resource. It brings together different partners, different actors with their own resources and with their own data, and we really put this in the simplest because we are resolving a problem that we've always had for many years, and that is we have a lot of data. That is important for modelling the social and physical aspects. As you mentioned, Anthony, that can be directly relevant for mentioning SDG 11. But this for all these many years, it has been spread across different places. So even for people who want to use this information it is really difficult to navigate through all the clutter and to really identify what is specific for what. That's where the data comes in here. What we do within the toolkit is to give one central place where the data is actually showing what is available, but it's also linked to specific sources. For example, data that Esri is producing or compiling, we're just showing these details available and this the metadata for that data. And this is how it's useful for specific things, but the place to get the data is really from Esri so we had the details stored for that. In terms of the use, the data cuts across different teams and it really represents the different aspects and requirements of SDG 11. We have data, as you said, on the physical, but also the social aspect. It helps you, for example, to be able to know where the buildings are within a city or within a country and that is very important … like data point or the kind of information needed for different things. We also have in this compilation data on population. More critically and more importantly, is the gated population data. This is really very important. Not just for measurement, but also for estimating things like event risk and disaster risk. But also when disasters happen, what is the likely effect to the population. This is the physical aspects of the data, that you could actually be able to see the physical components. Then the analytical aspect is really what we've been working with, and the countries and the cities are actually using this data to be able to analyse the specific sort of impacts or requirements that would be of worry. For example, something to do with access to public transport. Here the data would be the location for the public transport stops, but then they access the population data and will be something that overlays the population maps with their specific locations of these, then use the technology to really process the service areas, or which areas are served by the different transports. So definitely I would say that the data available within the toolkit really cross cuts both the social and the physical aspects that are not just required for SDG 11 monitoring, but also for making specific action oriented suggestions or recommendations based on the analysis.
Anthony Day
So you have a great deal to offer to communities. Are you finding that the communities are able and willing to work on what you're able to provide them with?
Good User Feedback
Dennis Mwaniki
Yes, have received very good feedback from the people who use the toolkit. Not just because they are easily able to identify what is available and how they can actually use it, but they also are able to learn through the toolkit. You also have a lot of learning opportunities that show step-by-step, or how to use different products, and how this can be translated in specific action. We have very good feedback of people actually using these and finding it useful.
Anthony Day
Right, well this looks very much like a long-term project. Carmelle, how do you see things developing over coming years?
The Future
Carmelle Terborgh
It’s really essential that we continue to work together and collaborate in this way. A lot of the data that Dennis mentioned is available through the Esri ArcGIS Living Atlas, and that Living Atlas has some of that physical data and a lot of that population data. For instance, we just recently added the world population data for the globe or the 10 meter land cover data for the globe. And then especially for developing countries where you may not have a space agency providing satellite imagery to you and you need to rely on your partners across the globe. That publicly available data being able to be served up in a very efficient way just really shortens the time frame for people to be able to use that information much more readily and to work together and really focus on the issues at hand. Things like having inclusive urban planning, making sure that the informal settlements are not always being built in very dangerous locations like floodplains or up hillsides where you may have mud slides in these types of things. Those who are responsible for those municipalities are much more readily able to learn how to use this data, and then use the data for their decision making and making sure they're protecting their citizens. The informal settlements in many parts of the world are in the areas that are least safe, and there are vast huge numbers of people living in these very fragile and very dangerous locations. Whether it's hillsides that are lacking vegetation that aren't necessarily going to be doing well during these increased storms we are facing from climate change, or whether it's the flooding in the lowlands where they may end up losing … lives and livelihoods. It’s really important we do work together. We're definitely increasing our collaboration globally. It's very nice to see so many partners contributing to this. Whether it's capacity building, like training resources or datasets and tools and solutions.
I just want to highlight there's this idea of applying the geographic approach to this type of effort, and why geospatial information is so important. I think it's really key that we think about this approach where you're collecting and measuring the earth and the information that you need and pulling that data together. And then you're modelling and analysing it. You're collaborating, perhaps with partners, and sharing that information to be able to come up with scenarios that have like, what shall we be doing, and then you have it presented to the decision makers for decisions to be taken. And ultimately, actions can be taken. We need to increase that sort of geographic approach where we get data and get it into action more and more over these coming years. The SDG's… we only have eight more years to be achieving these, and we're still collecting a lot of the baseline information, so it's pretty critical that we keep working closely.
Anthony Day
Absolutely. So Dennis, how do you see the next eight years?
Dennis Mwaniki
The next eight years I see, well, first from the collaboration perspective that Carmelle mentioned we’ve seen a lot of really serious willingness and harnessed push for people to really collaborate. I mean to be honest, this has been a big challenge. Previously we have different agencies and different solutions have specific tasks. Which is understandable, but which might not align to say the global needs for monitoring or say what we need for the SDGs. If we don't have a clear engagement strategy on how we really bring everyone together and we work together honestly and genuinely, it's always going to be a problem. One thing that we've seen really changing significantly is that honest willingness for people to engage. Even sometimes competing organisations are really working together to promote the same goal that we need to increase the use of other divisions geospatial information for monitoring data for action. This is one thing that I see really significantly being something that contributes to the future that we want. Two - In the next eight years we are likely to see still a bit of work in monitoring and understanding trends. It's because in many cases and for many of the indicators as you might know are within the SDG framework were new or so when they went released in 2015, and many countries have not been able even to prioritise quite a number of them for measurement, despite the fact that really a lot of them are very important to inform a specific kind of action on how we make progress towards sustainability. We’ll see a hybrid of some things really progressing into action, or implementation of specific actions. Where we've progressed significantly in terms of understanding the trends, they'll be a bit more of the actions to us implemented strategies to respond. But in in places where there's still a bit of lag in really trying to measure and understand will still see, at least in my personal perspective, a bit of work to us measuring. By 2030 we will have really good progress in implementation of some of the actions, but will also have also good progress in understanding of the need for measurement and really implementing measurement strategies.
Anthony Day
Well, thank you and thank you both very much for taking the time. Thank you, Dennis. Thank you, Carmelle for talking today to the Sustainable Futures report.
Carmelle Terborgh
Thank you, Anthony.
Dennis Mwaniki
Thank you, Anthony. Really great to be part of this.
Carmelle Terborgh of Esri and Dennis Mwaniki of UN Habitat.
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There will be another Wednesday Interview this time next week, and your regular Sustainable Futures Report on Friday.
That’s it for this time.
That was the Wednesday Interview from the Sustainable Futures Report.
I’m Anthony Day.
Bye for now.
Links
Esri
https://www.esri.com/en-us/home
https://www.esri.com/en-us/about/climate-change/overview