Home ›› 03 Aug 2021 ›› Opinion
The United Nations is supporting its member countries about how to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with an increased demand of strategic guidance on science-based information at the heart of its implementation. The SDGs seek for a significant demand from the scientific communities who have been experienced in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) substantially. The key factors in social, economic and environmental development require a model change of individual management system in climate change, food, health, renewable energy, or water provision principally with a coordinated global monitoring system.
However, many initiatives remain to be done in the upcoming model change for the 17 goals comprised of 169 targets, where 91 of which require to be specified elaborately, as reported in regarding the issue. A framework needs to be established to measure the progress of SDGs on local, national, regional or global levels across the sectors. A standard monitoring and evaluation system certainly requires many research initiatives that should be set up for the purpose. To guide actions, the strategic connections between several targets of SDGs need to be clearly understood. Many synergies and trade-offs depend on a range of repetitive activities, or alternative actions - for instance, larger fertilizer use might boost food production and farmers’ incomes, but would make worse pollution on the other hand. So, we may assume on such good operations locally for the betterment of the community, and even influence a small impact on local climate-change, but the consequences are global.
A set of realistic indices is very much needed for tracking the progress of each SDG. Since the achievement of goals are mostly interconnected functions of each other goals, so the experts from different field (social scientists, physical scientists, economists etc.) need to work together, or perform as the team in designing the metrics. For example, ensuring access to modern and sustainable energy for all (goal 7) requires indicators of enhancement in energy efficiency with carbon savings from all aspects of renewable-energy technologies. Parameters should be adjusted with other than economic growth only, such as income disparity, carbon emissions, people satisfaction or the population lifespan.
Existing methodologies can be reformed in some new ways of adaptations which may significantly include environmental impact assessment, cost–benefit analysis, natural-asset valuation, and life-cycle costing of a project or product development. One thing in the operations, we are used to wording some ambiguous terms like ‘substantial’ ‘sustainable’, ‘efficient’. But these terms cannot be meaningful in most of the cases, which need to be explained with adequate quantitative and qualitative information, so that the achieving goals can be easily measurable and comparable. More specifically in the matrices, we have to include evidence based information from several scientific analyses of different scenarios.
In many cases an effective monitoring framework is found the most significant lacking in our development agenda. We usually don’t want to focus on efficient budgeting for monitoring and maintaining of a project outcome as much as it is considered in initiating a project implementation. But when we will say about a project implementation, the project life cycle needs to be required with all about its aspects including a continuous monitoring and maintenance whenever necessary in the lifespan. Governments and researchers must think about the values, which need to be tracked in the process, and set up an individual system for each goal to acquire the data. For example, quantities such as energy and water consumption in each case, relative emissions and health impacts of individuals need to be monitored, as do with scientific variables such as water pollution control mechanism, air pollution control mechanism, food safety mechanism, and so on. Research conduction by social scientists may propose what kind of data on societal values, behavior and beliefs need to be gathered and analyzed, how and by whom.
Analysis and interpretation must go forward at the same time, preferably by one or more independent government-backed organizations, to consider the data in the relevant context. In keeping water-quality parameters, for example, monitoring of physical, chemical and biological features of water, such as pH and COD (chemical oxygen demand) are compared against some factors as regarded water-quality standards nationally or regionally and the health impacts on human and ecosystem
Our government may follow the evaluation process of some international scientific bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. It is hopeful that the government is increasing its monitoring procedures through establishing several task forces to settle on how they evaluate relevant aspects of each goal. These task forces must expand their remits, suggestions and experiences to the central SDG assessment body. However, the SDG evaluators must take into considerations how to integrate the contributions of locals, cities, regions, companies and others into national and international demand; consider local and national circumstances when evaluating the progress; and check whether SDGs has been incorporated in the planning and strategy processes at all levels.
Developing infrastructure is one of the key prerequisites to achieve the SDGs. We have recently observed that the government is very friendly to expand infrastructures of different development sectors in aligned with some specific SDGs. In this regard, the essential activities may include ground-based monitoring system, which means earth observations to enhance the information-processing capabilities. To improve satisfactory global coverage, we need direct comparisons of data through using similar instruments such as storing, analyzing and sharing data.
Data gathering can be enhanced widely by using smart phones and miniature sensors that capture particularly point-source industrial emissions, other pollution sources, waste dumping or any other unsustainable consumption. Citizen science on the other hand may provide new opportunities. For example, initiated in 2008, Beijing residents’ utilized the Twitter to collect air-pollution data from home-based monitoring equipment and ultimately created a pressure to the municipality to improve its air-quality monitoring system. The most advantage of such actions is a check on reporting- reach to bias-free from governments, companies or others.
Geographical information systems (GIS) may be essential to host and share data from the observing channels. We can increase use of GIS in decision making process especially through image processing and simulation techniques that ultimately support sustainability planning, designing, implementation and enforcement. In many cases, the process is not open for all, but it should be openly accessible to the citizens, so that people can think and rethink about their decisions as how to improve air quality, ecosystem or ocean health- as for example. Businesses can also be tracked in their environmental impacts and future project supplies.
Developing countries like Bangladesh need to collaborate with scientific bodies to build capacity in the statistical tools, mainly in observing and data mining. In this regard, we can get help from some bodies such as the G20 Development Working Group and the Inter Academy Panel.
The writer is an environment researcher and sustainability professional
