Earth observations for sustainable development goals monitoring based on essential variables and driver-pressure-state-impact-response indicators

Abstract

In recent years, researchers of different communities have increased their efforts in formalizing a set of measurements regularly collected for analysing changes in Drivers, States, Impacts and Responses of a given discipline. In some cases, different actors have converged in a minimum set of Essential Variables (EVs), such as for Climate, Biodiversity or Oceans. The definition of such EVs is an ongoing evolution and in extension (e.g. EVs for water) although some communities have not even started (e.g. agriculture and energy). This paper characterizes the Earth Observation (EO) networks and creates a graph representation of their relations. Secondly, this graph is enriched with the EVs produced by each network creating a knowledge base. Finally, an effort has been done to identify links between EVs and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators in a way that they indirectly connect the EO. An analysis to detect gaps in EO variables due to a lack of observational networks is performed. Several suggestions for improving SDG indicators framework by considering EVs are exposed, as well as proposing new necessary EVs and suggesting new EO based indicators. The complete graph is available in the ENEON website (http://www.eneon.net/graph-ev-sdg/).

Keywords

• gap analysis
• policy monitoring
• essential variables
• earth observation