A Week of SDG in Smart Cities
I recently attended a UN ESCAP Partner forum, Sustainable Urbanization in Asia. This was followed by a session from “Bridge for Cities 2021: Driving Innovation for Urban Resilience and Recovery from COVID-19”. During both sessions, the discussions were focused on global environmental challenges. I will highlight the main challenges of SDG progress and some of the activities launched in some cities.
The UN ESCAP session started with a brief report overview from some participating countries, who shared a summary of their SDG reports and progress on data collection.
The SDG report is a yearly report, submitted by each country to share their progress in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals, the target of 2030. Not all participating countries had their report ready for submission, and during the session, this problem was discussed together with some of the common issues the cities are facing in each country.
There was an additional session about Urban resilience, which was presented a couple of days later. This session seems very aligned with the COP26 (Conference of the Parties) A UN climate change conference. The discussion during this session was focused on participating cities' experiences to tackle issues related to climate change.
The challenges the countries have in reporting and data collection and submission, as well as how the cities are looking at and focusing on Smart City challenges.
The Global urban monitoring framework for the New Urban Agenda was the main topic for this session. The framework describes how to implement the reporting system for the New Urban Agenda, by achieving the SDG11 goal by 2030. During the presentation, we notice how other SDGs get involved in the quest to achieve the goals.
The framework expects the participating countries to execute an efficient data collection model and empower city officials to manage the local data collection and reporting. Such a strategy is very complicated to implement in countries where the system is designed for top-down decisions. In total, the participants are expected to collect from 72 indicators, spanning domains like Society, Economy, Environment, and Governance.
As you can see from the table of indicators, it can be quite a challenge to collect the right type of data. Although the UN provides some detailed guidelines for the data collection, the task is voluntary. This means unless the government or local government implements some incentives, then most likely nobody, will commit to collecting the data and preparing the reports. Moreover, the process is time-consuming and requires knowledge and skills within the sectors the data are collected.
During the session, the discussion went on to understand the challenges from the local government entities, where an attempt for volunteer groups is assigned to support the data collection. These are remote cities or villages, that may not have the means, resources, or skills to follow the data collection guidelines. The challenges ranged from basic computer literacy to local language to English translation as well as for the individuals to have enough bandwidth to take up these activities.
It was also highlighted that there is a wide range of online course material made available from the UN to bring awareness and to understand the various processes and methods (https://learning.uclg.org/)
Some examples of environmental analysis were introduced, to explain how cities can leverage open data to for example understand the air pollution in a region. An example was explained by using satellite images, weather data, and air sensor data to analyze how polluted the air was in certain areas.
By applying a data science approach, the team was able to determine the source of the pollution, which was for example field or forest fires. Such data could be used to put together policies to reduce these emissions and to educate the farmers or companies with alternative solutions.
Another example was showing plastic waste in sea waters and rivers. These data also indicated the high intensity of plastic output, which indicates the need for change in plastic usage to alternative packaging and more.
A common pledge from all the city representatives was to build collaboration with businesses and citizens. If businesses can take a lead in producing products and services with respect to the environment, and report data to comply with the SDGs, it could result in an improved environmental situation. It could boost the economy and attract more foreign business and investments.
