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Information and Communications Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals: State-of-the-Art, Needs and Perspectives
Jinsong Wu, Song Guo, Huawei Huang, William Liu, Yong Xiang
TL;DR
The paper addresses the limited understanding of how ICTs relate to the 17 SDGs and reviews that relationship across sustainable development’s social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Its literature review finds that ICT-related SDG research has largely emphasized technical aspects, with insufficient holistic social-good perspectives, motivating broader attention to ICT innovation for the 2030 goals.
Problem
Research has insufficiently examined the relationship between ICTs and the SDGs, particularly across holistic social, economic, and environmental perspectives.
Method
The paper conducts panoramic and extensive literature reviews of SDG-related ICT initiatives, activities, and research across three sustainable-development dimensions.
Results
Most IEEE- and ACM-recognized SDG contributions emphasize technical ICT aspects, while holistic social-good perspectives remain underrepresented.
Takeaways & Limitations
The paper calls for greater awareness, interdisciplinary attention, and ICT innovation to support nations in pursuing the SDGs by 2030.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly accepted the 2030 Development Agenda, which has included 92 paragraphs, and the Paragraph 91 defined 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets. The goal of this paper is to discover the correlations among SDGs and information and communications technologies (ICTs). This paper discusses the roles and opportunities that ICTs play in pursuing the SDGs. We identify a number of research gaps to those three pillars, social, economic, and environmental perspectives, of sustainable development. After extensive literature reviews on the SDG-related research initiatives and activities, we find that the majority of contributions to SDGs recognized by the IEEE and ACM research communities have mainly focused on the technical aspects, while there are lack of the holistic social good perspectives. Therefore, there are essential and urgent needs to raise the awareness and call for attentions on how to innovate and energize ICTs in order to best assist all nations to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
I. INTRODUCTION
The 2030 Agenda established 17 SDGs and 169 targets, while ICTs are positioned as catalysts for development despite limited explicit coverage. This paper reviews ICT–SDG research to identify gaps and promote broader collaboration and social-good perspectives.
- The 2030 Agenda, approved in September 2015, established 17 SDGs and 169 targets for development between 2015 and 2030.
- Although ICTs are not specifically named in any SDG, the agenda identifies them as tools that can accelerate development, bridge digital gaps, and build knowledge communities.
- ICT research has emphasized storage, computing, communications, and networking, whereas SDG progress also requires collaboration across researchers, industry, governments, and organizations.
- The paper investigates how ICT-related research has addressed the SDGs and identifies insufficient attention to goals including gender equality, reduced inequalities, and peace, justice, and strong institutions.
- The paper reviews prior initiatives, analyzes SDG research across social, economic, and environmental dimensions, and concludes with future work.
II. BACKGROUND
The background traces sustainable development from earlier international agendas to the universal 2030 framework. It presents sustainable development as involving economic, social, and environmental dimensions and emphasizes adaptable, practical SDGs.
- The paper reviews the background, post-2015 research initiatives, and literature-based categorization of the SDGs.
- Sustainable development is described through economic, social, and environmental dimensions that are independent yet mutually supportive.
- Earlier initiatives, including Agenda 21, the Millennium Declaration, and Rio+20, progressively shaped broader sustainable-development objectives.
- The post-2015 agenda framed SDGs around inclusive human development, equity, human rights, and a broader scope than earlier conference drafts.
- The follow-up development vision called for integrated solutions to interdependent challenges and policies adapted to local settings.
- The paper classifies the 17 SDGs into social, economic, and environmental dimensions according to human needs.
B. Pioneering Actions on SDG-related Research
Post-2015 SDG initiatives established early models and reviews, but ICT-focused technical communities had not yet given the topic sufficient attention. The paper organizes SDGs into three dimensions and related human-needs groups.
- Representative initiatives addressed SDGs through models of human needs, social equity, environmental constraints, and sectoral reporting.
- Early SDG research initiatives existed after September 2015, but technical ICT communities still provided limited attention.
- Kondratieff Waves link successive periods of economic and technological innovation to major industrial technologies.
- The authors argue that sustainability is a universal feature of human history, although its levels and manifestations vary across periods.
- The 17 SDGs are grouped into social, economic, and environmental dimensions, with smaller categories based on human needs.
III. ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY
The economic-sustainability discussion covers poverty, food supply, healthcare, economic growth, industrialization, and innovation. It highlights measurement, digital inclusion, ICT-enabled poverty reduction, and agricultural challenges.
- This section examines poverty reduction, food supply, healthcare, economic growth, sustainable industrialization, and innovation fostering.
- Traditional poverty measurement based on income indicators and poverty lines may unrealistically separate poor and non-poor populations.
- ICT infrastructure can produce and spread knowledge, supporting productivity and holistic human development.
- ICT projects can reduce poverty by expanding access to markets, empowering institutions to assist poor people, and improving security against risks.
- Agriculture is essential to rural populations in developing countries and faces severe challenges requiring further analysis.
2) Sustainable Agriculture (SDG 2):
ICTs are presented as tools for improving agricultural efficiency, productivity, and sustainability under population growth and resource constraints, while related technologies also support food quality and healthcare services.
- ICTs in agriculture could potentially improve efficiency, productivity, and sustainability amid population growth, water shortages, soil decline, urbanization, and climate-change effects.
- An optimization model addresses food-quality degradation and reduces waste from unqualified items in the food supply chain.
- A healthcare information platform supports personalized services, intelligent remote healthcare, and guardianship.
- A home-monitoring system uses environmental sensors and behavior patterns to assess early health changes.
4) Education Promoting and Learning Opportunities Brought by ICT Technologies (SDG 4):
ICT technologies broaden access to education through Internet-based and ubiquitous learning, while sustainable development requires engineers to address technical, social, and environmental concerns together.
- Education Promoting and Learning Opportunities Brought by ICT Technologies (SDG 4): Internet and media-rich web applications enable students unable to attend classes to receive comparable education opportunities.
- Education Promoting and Learning Opportunities Brought by ICT Technologies (SDG 4): Ubiquitous Learning Environments integrate mobile devices with technological and social ecologies but create additional challenges for teachers.
- Open Issues that Need Embedded Sustainability into the Engineering Design: Effective ICT-use education is identified as a critical key for further poverty reduction.
- Open Issues that Need Embedded Sustainability into the Engineering Design: Engineering projects should address technical and social challenges while incorporating sustainability, especially in underdeveloped regions.
- Open Issues that Need Embedded Sustainability into the Engineering Design: Sustainable industrialization requires resolving limited-resource constraints through accelerated development of high and green technologies.
IV. SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
The social-sustainability discussion focuses on widening disparities and examines gender inequity through education, employment, industry culture, classification, and social-network behavior.
- Social Sustainability: Significant disparities in opportunity, wealth, and power motivate attention to gender inequity, unemployment, and inequalities within and among countries.
- Social Sustainability: Research on computer-science education in China links gender issues to employment, subject major, information-company representation, social conventionality, and industry culture.
- Social Sustainability: Studies examine whether ethnicity and gender classifications mutually affect one another.
- Social Sustainability: Social-network research uses reposting behavior, statistics, sociology, latent semantic indexing, and K-nearest neighbors to predict gender.
2) Reduction of Economic Inequality in Country Layer (SDG 10):
The reviewed work addresses economic inequality through measurement, control, and spatial visualization, while sustainable-city research combines multidimensional indicators, ICT-based big data, and resilience planning.
- Reduction of Economic Inequality in Country Layer (SDG 10): Membership functions and an attitude-index approach measure both positive and negative social effects of relative poverty beyond the Gini coefficient.
- Reduction of Economic Inequality in Country Layer (SDG 10): Linear-matrix-inequality methods model economic stability, while geo-statistics and spatial visualization estimate development inequality in Xinjiang.
- Sustainable Cities (SDG 11): Sustainable-city indicators are organized across environmental, economic, social, territorial, and political dimensions.
- Sustainable Cities (SDG 11): Smart-city development is described as needing an ICT-based big-data foundation, while TripleRM supports long-term management of urban risk, resources, and resilience.
2) Sustainable Consumption and Production (SDG 12):
ICT research addresses sustainable consumption and production through energy monitoring, efficiency mechanisms, electronic justice, education, and organizational collaboration, while broader social-sustainability challenges remain open.
- Sustainable consumption and production: ICT studies monitor household and industrial energy use and investigate mechanisms for improving energy efficiency.Examples include plug-level appliance metering, manufacturing energy-saving mechanisms, and analysis of production energy consumption.
- Sustainable consumption and production: Electronic-justice and electronic-government tools aim to provide more convenient access to justice information and services.
- Sustainable consumption and production: Mobile technologies can support collaboration in school education, while collaborative teams provide experience relevant to sustainability.
- Open issues: Research on inequity mainly evaluates gender and country disparities, leaving their alleviation as an open issue requiring further effort.
- Open issues: Future sustainable cities require attention to liveability, life quality, resource management, bottom-up design, systematic thinking, and collective global partnerships.
V. ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Environmental sustainability research covers water and sanitation access alongside sustainable energy supply, including ICT-enabled services such as web systems and smart grids.
- Environmental sustainability: Water and sanitation access remains difficult for many people, and waterborne disease contributes to severe human consequences.The passage reports that nearly 1000 children die per day from waterborne diseases.
- Environmental sustainability: DevClear is a web-based system designed to help organizations meet community needs for water supply and sanitation services.
- Environmental sustainability: Sustainable energy supply is identified as essential to societal sustainable development and is studied through CO2 constraints and socio-ecological frameworks.
- Environmental sustainability: ICT-enabled smart-grid technology and Li-ion-battery electric-vehicle technologies are presented as components of sustainable energy services and future energy systems.The electric-vehicle technologies are described as being at a premature stage and requiring further designs and products.
B. Environments Call for Sustainability
Environmental sustainability research responds to climate change and ecosystem pressures through emissions mitigation, public education, modelling, ocean observation, and ecosystem-based management.
- Environments call for sustainability: Climate change produces impacts including iceberg melting, sea-level rise, frequent extreme drought, and drastic ecosystem change, requiring urgent action.
- Environments call for sustainability: ICT-related efforts address climate change through emissions-mitigation strategies, public education, augmented-reality simulation, population analysis, and uncertainty-aware quantification.
- Environments call for sustainability: The Paris Agreement seeks to address greenhouse-gas emissions and enhance climate-resilient development through an international environmental treaty.The passage states that 195 countries and nations signed the agreement.
- Environments call for sustainability: Ocean sustainability matters because oceans provide food, energy, trade, commerce, biodiversity, and coupling with weather and climate variations.
- Environments call for sustainability: Ocean-observing infrastructures use sensors, cooperation frameworks, and integrated prediction systems to support aquaculture, transatlantic collaboration, and ocean modelling.
- Environments call for sustainability: Ecosystem-based management studies address marine ecosystems, climate effects on fisheries, and projects for sustainable marine-environment management.
3) Protect, Restore and Promote Sustainable Use of Terrestrial Ecosystems (Goal 15):
Terrestrial sustainability research examines forests, land degradation, remote sensing, biodiversity data, climate science, and an ICT orchestration architecture for environmental SDGs.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: Forest sustainability studies use entropy analysis, coordinated control, radar techniques, and Earth observation to examine forest ecosystems and management.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: Land degradation research applies remote sensing to assessment and examines tourism’s environmental impacts in desert areas.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: Remote sensing and GIS support sustainable land and water resource development, desertification analysis, biomass modelling, ecological planning, and biodiversity data management.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: Marine energy resources, including wave, tide, and offshore wind, are considered reliable renewable sources for future sustainable energy supply.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: Europe leads adoption of renewable energy and abandonment of fossil fuels, while the United States and China are described as moving more slowly.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: Climate research needs data-science approaches for spatio-temporal and physical phenomena, while efficient use of large scientific datasets remains challenging.
- Terrestrial ecosystems: The proposed ICT orchestration architecture senses biotic and abiotic data with IoT devices, processes it at edge or remote clouds, and sends extracted information to an orchestration center.The architecture is intended to promote environmental SDGs and encourage partnerships, case studies, and real-world applications.
VI. CONCLUSION
The paper concludes that SDGs extend beyond the 2030 agenda and require broader, sustained efforts across global sustainability challenges. It reviews SDG–ICT relevance, identifies limited overall research and development, and calls for expanded scientific, technological, industrial, and governmental support.
- SDGs should guide development across global economies, societies, and environments, while sustainability challenges extend far beyond the 17 listed goals.
- The paper investigates SDG–ICT relevance through panoramic reviews and discussions, finding limited overall research and development on ICT-related SDG achievement.
- Achieving SDGs requires greater global scientific, technological, industrial, and governmental efforts, alongside attention to ICTs’ own long-term sustainability issues.