Sustainable Development Goals - Enhanced monitoring through the family of copErnicus Services

The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a data driven agenda, and the use of Earth Observation (EO) can make the SDG indicators’ monitoring and reporting viable, technically, and financially, and comparable across countries.SDGs-EYES aims at boosting the European capacity for monitoring the SDGs based on Copernicus, building a portfolio of decision-making tools to monitor those SDG indicators related to the environment from an inter-sectoral perspective, aligning with the EU Green Deal priorities and challenges.SDGs-EYES will establish an integrated scientific, technological and user engagement framework overcoming the knowledge and technical barriers that prevent the exploitation, combination and cross-feeding of data and tools from the Copernicus’s six core Services, its space-based and in-situ components, and other platforms and portals.SDGs-EYES considers three interconnected SDGs, on climate (SDG13), ocean (SDG14) and land (SDG15), to demonstrate through four Pilots the Copernicus potential for monitoring six indicators making part of the EU and national assessments: GHG emissions, temperature deviation, ocean acidification, marine eutrophication, forest cover change and soil erosion.

Although focusing on the biosphere, these indicators are linked to other SDGs on socio-economic and (geo)political factors (e.g., human health, resources security, poverty, conflicts, displacements).

Thus, an additional cross-goals indicator and Pilot will focus on vulnerable communities under cumulative climate extreme hazards.SDGs-EYES seeks to combine the science-informed (top-down) approach with a stakeholder-driven (bottom-up) approach to transfer scientific outcomes into easy-to-understand and easy-to-use actionable information in the context of SDG indicators’ assessment.

Decision-making tools delivered by Pilots will be co-designed with users, to offer opportunities to regularly assess and refresh methodologies they adopt for monitoring and reporting.