Remote Sensing Letters contribution to the success of the Sustainable Development Goals - UN 2030 agenda

The World Summit on Sustainable Development ‘Rio+10’ in Johannesburg in 2002 determined the need to substantiate the priorities related to the interaction of society and nature, creating a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This has substantially contributed to the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the period 2000–2015 to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This agenda through its SDGs (comprising 17 goals and 169 targets) addresses key global challenges including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice with a plan for achieving all this by 2030 (United Nations 2015, 2018). These goals are:

1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere

2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

10: Reduce inequality within and among countries

11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development

15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

So what is to be the role of remote sensing, Earth observation (EO), and therefore of Remote Sensing Letters (RSL), in all this? Remote sensing, using data from satellites, light aircraft or UAVs makes it possible to gather scientific information or environmental data over very large areas, frequently and accurately in ways that were impossible before these systems became available. Therefore, it has become possible to detect the environmental effects of human activities in ways that were not previously possible. RSL therefore welcomes receiving articles that describe recent communications of important results related to attempts to achieve these sustainable development goals.

As is well known, various food chains involve creatures higher up in the chain acting as predators on creatures lower down in the chain. But the weapons used are usually just their teeth and claws, although some have developed other ‘external’ weapons, such as the spider’s web or the traps of the pitcher plants, etc. Homo sapiens is different. We have developed all sorts of weapons to prey on other species, to extract minerals from the ground to generate energy that we use for all sorts of purposes to drive our whole way of life. This has led some people to describe the present time as a new geological time period, the Anthropocene (see e.g. Lewis and Maslin 2018), during which the Earth is, for the first time, being seriously affected by the activities of Homo sapiens and, indeed, this can lead to the supposition that Homo sapiens is so powerful that we can actually control the Earth, and therefore the climate. We have yet to learn that we are probably mistaken in that.

The Conference of the Parties no. 26 to the UNFCCC that was scheduled to be held in Glasgow in November 2020 has recently been postponed until 2021 on account of the coronavirus epidemic. Other Climate Summits like Paris – 2015 (COP 21), Marrakech – 2016 (COP 22), Bonn – 2017 (COP 23), Katowice – 2018[AC1] (COP 24), Madrid UN – 2019 (COP 25), or the International Arctic Forum 2019 in St. Petersburg did not fulfil the overall understanding of the global environmental crisis and its future consequences.

As stated by Varotsos (2002), further discussion on the priorities of global change problems is needed, but it must be done taking into account the fact that the Earth System has been operating in different quasi-stable states for the last half million years and that global change cannot be understood from the standpoint of a simple cause-effect paradigm. Do human activities actually have the ability to change the Earth System in ways that can turn out to be irreversible? Has the Earth System (operating in a non-analogue state) moved far beyond the range of natural variability? In the case of changing climatic issues, are recent estimates relevant to the facts? Such general and extremely important questions need to be addressed urgently using the Earth observations (EOs), whose recent research advances in both methodological development and technological solutions can make a significant contribution. In particular, remotely sensed EO and traditional environmental measurements have already provided the climate community with unique databases for several decades (Cracknell and Varotsos 2007). In the case of EO satellite imagery from radar and optical sensors, the spatial coverage increases but the frequency of observations is limited to the revisiting period of a particular orbit. Due to the fact that the raw data of the satellites cannot be used directly with the in-situ measurements, they are processed and transformed by space agencies (e.g., European Space Agency) and are useful for the creation of high-level harmonized in-situ and remote sensing data (GEO 2017; https://www.copernicus.eu/en/services). The optimization of observing platforms and networks has been the target of many efforts such as the Global Ocean Observing System that defined a set of Essential Ocean Variables that adopt common standards for data collection and dissemination, as well as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, based, inter alia, on biodiversity monitoring worldwide (Masó et al. 2020).

A system, like the climate system, is defined by its structure and behaviour. The behaviour of such a system is intended to provide uninterrupted functioning by means of a correspondingly organized structure and behaviour. This characteristic of the complex system to actively interact with an external medium is referred to as survivability (Cracknell, Krapivin, and Varotsos 2009). The key questions to be answered within the numerous investigations of global ecodynamics are:

• What are the levels, interactions and significance of the ‘human dimension’ (socio-economic factors) in the development of society and its role in global environmental change?

• What are the current and potential future impacts of global environmental variability on economic development, what factors determine the capability of society to respond to changing events, what are the opportunities to provide sustainable development and reduce man’s sensitivity to forcings?

• What are the possible methods of decision-making in sustainable development under conditions of Nature-Society system complexity and high-level uncertainties regarding the global environmental variability?

The climate is a unique complex system and from an historical viewpoint, man is an element of it. However, at present, the problem of co-evolution between human society and nature has arisen. The impact of human activity on natural systems has reached a global scale, and it is important to try to make a conditional division between anthropogenic and natural processes. A typical description of this division can be obtained using the tool of system analysis. Usually, there are two interacting systems: human society with technologies, sciences, economics, sociology, agriculture, industry, etc., and nature with climatic, ecological, biogeochemical, hydrological, geophysical and other natural processes. Parameterization and investigation of the interaction of these systems is the main objective of current investigations. More precisely, the principal aim is to evaluate biosphere sustainability limits using model simulation technology along with archived datasets of global observations, including those derived from satellites (Krapivin and Varotsos 2017). Existing data collection tools for natural and anthropogenic processes make it possible to create a data set that covers large areas up to the entire biosphere. Remote sensing of environmental monitoring is particularly effective here.

There is a set of global models that describe the interactions within the nature-society system. However, in these models the study of nature-society system is limited by simple considerations of the main integrated properties of the system dynamics without digital space analysis. Varotsos, Krapivin, and Soldatov (2019) have introduced a new type of global modelling technology, based on an adaptive combination of models, algorithms and experiments. Different environmental and anthropogenic processes are well configured using various approaches to synthesize a new global model that describes all aspects of human interactions with environmental bodies and their physical, biological and chemical systems. A global model of this type differs from existing models on the basis of a detailed description of the climate system by examining a small set of biospheric components. Unfortunately, global and regional scale studies of the processes and impacts of global change using this approach have not yet yielded satisfactory results. That is why the global model that will be developed in future projects allows for the solution of the problem of sustainable development by looking at many socio-economic, ecological and climate processes. Moreover, traditional approaches to building a global model encounter some difficulties in algorithmically describing these processes, so one has to deal with the uncertainty of the information. These approaches to global modelling simply ignore this uncertainty and, consequently, the structure of the resulting model does not adequately reflect actual processes. Future projects will use evolutionary modelling technology to eliminate this drawback by developing a combined model whose structure can be adapted to the background of a biosphere and climate system.

As Varotsos (2020) mentioned in a recent RSL Editorial, submissions tackling climate change and environmental protection related to the UN’s SDGs will be welcomed. These papers linking the SDGs and RSL can help to meet these goals, and provide the countries with the latest advances in both Geospatial Information and EO research in order to better achieve their SDG's targets and report fully on the SDGs global indicator framework.

We therefore urge our readers and the wider remote sensing research community to use the SDG framework as a principal axis for the development of their research in relation to relevant goals, targets and indicators. In this spirit, we invite you to contribute to this area by publishing the important results of your research in the RSL journal.