The Role of the Geospatial Information System (GIS) in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): A Spatial Framework for Sustainable Planning Processes

Introduction

Sustainable Development (SD) is the term commonly and broadly used to describe a complex range of objectives, activities, and mankind behaviors with respect to the environmental, economic and social issues which should be consistent with the aims of meeting the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. This concept implies that both technological and social settings should be organized so that human activities would not overload the capacity of the biosphere to absorb their impacts (Menash, 2019).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also recognized as Global Goals, include a set of 17 areas that have been set in 2015. These broad and universal goals are significantly focused on reducing poverty, safeguarding the globe, and ensuring prosperity is aimed entirely toward an innovative sustainable agenda. Every goal line has particular objectives to be accomplished over the following 15 years. Governments, businesses, and civil societies collectively with the United Nation (UN) have started to achieve these goals based on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (Anwar et al., 2017).

The SDGs have been adopted as part of the 2030 Agenda for SD. Providing in-depth knowledge, these goals foster comprehensive research on global targets. The sustainability of our planet is currently a major concern for the global community and has a central theme for a number of major global initiatives in recent years. The SDGs call for action by all countries to promote prosperity while protecting Earth and life support system. These Goals aim to provide a comprehensive platform for scientific, teaching, and research communities working on various global issues in the field of geography, earth science, environmental science, social science, economy, engineering, policy, planning, and human geosciences in order to contribute knowledge towards achieving the proposed 17 Sustainable Development Goals on the basis of the environmental, social and economic challenges and issues (Kumar et al., 2019).

Economic, social, and environmental processes are inherently spatial. They can hardly be fully understood without taking into account their spatial dimensions. The relationship between man and the environment cannot be represented without a reference to a special location, because the environment is described by the topological relationships among physical objects and human activities produce impacts on the environment spatially (Campagna, 2006).

With global policy and intergovernmental mechanisms, now recognizing and calling for the need to integrate geospatial information into sustainable development processes, the challenge for national geospatial information systems is what tangible action can be taken. There is now emerging understanding, in fact a rapidly growing realization, that implementation the SDGs, and measuring and monitoring their progress, will require new and large amounts of data, more rigorous modeling and analysis, and much better data management. It will also take transformative change and collaborative approaches to link different data – demographic, statistical, earth observations, environmental and other societal geospatial data together with the one thing they have in common – to geo-referencing and location bases. Furthermore, Geospatial Information Technology has the capacity to create, analyse, model and develop the spatial applications and visualization of geographical phenomena and features. In the last decades, GIS provided a plethora of theories, methods, and tools for sustainable development (Scott & Rajabifard, 2017).