A new paper was published on how citizen science data are already contributing or could contribute to the monitoring of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the WeObserve SDGs and Citizen Science Community of Practice.
Huge amounts of accurate, timely, and comprehensive data are required to track progress towards the SDGs. The 17 goals set by the UN in 2015 currently include 169 targets and 231 unique indicators that are defined in an evolving framework. However, many of these indicators lack sufficient data for regularly tracking progress. According to a new article in Sustainability Science, citizen science data are already contributing and could contribute data to track a third of all SDG indicators.
This research was completed through WeObserve Community of Practice on the SDGs and Citizen Science (SDGs CoP)led by IIASA. Through a systematic review of the metadata and work plans of the 231 SDG indicators, as well as the identification of past and ongoing citizen science initiatives that could directly or indirectly provide data for these indicators, this paper presents an overview of where citizen science is already contributing and could contribute data to the SDG indicator framework.
To download and read the full paper, please visit here.