GROW & the Global Goals | Food, Climate Action & Life on Land.
By Deborah Long
[The Sustainable Development Goals Report] offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance. Ban Ki-moon (2013)
In June 2017, the United Nations published the Sustainable Development Goals Report an assessment of global progress towards the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.
While we all clearly have a long way to go, the GROW Observatory is demonstrating how progress towards three of the seventeen global goals can be made:
SGD2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
SDG13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
SDG15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
How is GROW Observatory Addressing these Global Goals?
The GROW Observatory is empowering tens of thousands of growers across Europe with knowledge on growing and the land, to increase access to affordable food, preserve the soil for future generations, and make a vital contribution to global environmental monitoring.
Citizen Observatories, and the GROW Observatory in particular, is in a strong position to make the links between underpinning progress towards the SDGs and citizen derived data. This approach provides two advantages: locally derived data and engaged citizens. This is thus a good illustration of a citizen observatory building capacity for citizens to get involved in governance and policy making by enabling citizens to take part and demonstrating how their actions can make a contribution to achieving these global goals, or SDGs.
How can citizens get involved with GROW?
In 2018, GROW is running two missions (sets of activities) that provide ways for citizens to gather, share and use build data on their soils and growing practices. These include a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), supported actions to gather, interpret and use data on soil conditions and growing practices.
The data are valuable to the citizens themselves who can use and share data so that we can produce soil moisture maps for example in selected areas of Europe and these data are also valuable to scientists who can use them to test models on land use derived from satellite data. These models map and predict the impact of changing climates, including flooding, droughts and fire risks for example. Finally, these data and the citizens who own these data have the potential to help policy makers build better policy based on local data and with the informed buy in from local communities.
Find out more about our Changing Climate Mission and our Living Soils missions on our website
