Motivation#

Monitoring and achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), e.g. “urban” SDG 11 (“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”), can face challenges especially in the low-income countries where the data needed for the proposed SDG indicators are usually scarce [Sun et al., 2020]. There is an estimated gap of $1 billion USD globally in funding for national statistical offices, and consequently, baseline geospatial data that should be provided by these agencies are often not accessible, not up-to-date or not available in standard formats [Altay and Labonte, 2014, Braunschweig et al., 2020]. Tackling data scarcity requires moving beyond insufficient traditional data sources to utilizing new, non-traditional sources for measuring the SDGs [Fritz et al., 2019].

It has been shown that open data communities — such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) — are not only promising, but already contribute to filling existing data gaps [Fritz et al., 2019, Herfort et al., 2021, Scholz et al., 2018]. In addition to contributions by individual volunteers (mappers), there is an intensifying trend that organized corporate and humanitarian mapping communities contribute to OSM in general [Anderson et al., 2019, Herfort et al., 2021]. OSM is now used widely for applications such as web maps and navigation services at and data about buildings from OSM has been used in domains such as urban planning [Milojevic-Dupont et al., 2020], SDG monitoring [Van Den Hoek et al., 2021], disaster management [Scholz et al., 2018], public health [Bhatia et al., 2018, Yeboah et al., 2021], as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic [Marco Minghini et al., 2020].

Your Task#

Select a SDG goal and use data from OSM and other sources to run a geographic analysis to support it’s monitoring. Write a report about your analysis (~3000 words).

Provide some background information (use scientific references) on how geospatial data can help to monitor this SDG goal. Propose a geographic analysis using OpenStreetMap data and (at least) one other dataset. Pick two or more location for which you will run your analysis. Discuss for each location to what extent OSM data is fit-for-purpose to run the analysis. Run the analysis and describe (and compare) the results for each location and also provide information on the limitations of your analytical approach and datasets.

Related Work#

Get some inspiration for your analysis here:

• Open Mapping for the SDGs

• MapAction Product Cataloque

• IFRC What is a Disaster?

• State of the Map US: How OSM can support UN SDGs

• State of the Map 2019: Assessing the Completeness of Urban Green Spaces in OpenStreetMap

• State of the Map 2022: OSM for sustainable transport planning

• Open Mapping towards Sustainable Development Goals - Voices of YouthMappers on Community Engaged Scholarship

Grading#