ABU DHABI // Organisations and experts at last week’s Eye on Earth Summit in the capital committed to sharing data to guide countries towards the UN’s sustainable development goals.
The delegates want to provide data to developing countries so their growth can be guided towards sustainability.
“The summit outcomes are central to advancing Eye on Earth’s vision of achieving a world where environmental and associated social and economic information, combined with citizen engagement, improves decisions leading to sustainable development,” said Razan Al Mubarak, secretary-general of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, a founding partner of Eye on Earth.
The outcomes also encouraged institutions to emphasise the role of citizen science and it was agreed that a global coalition of citizen science groups would be established by the Eye on Earth Alliance.
“[The outcomes] will make a direct contribution towards achieving the sustainable development goals and also, crucially, help to monitor progress through quality reporting,” said Ms Al Mubarak.
The Eye on Earth Network, set up during the conference in Abu Dhabi, is designed to play a key role in networking between institutions and for tracking progress towards the goals.
“We have a collective responsibility to make sure that the post-2015 development agenda is delivered,” said United Nations Environmental Programme executive director Achim Steiner, a main partner in the alliance.
He said that the goal was to get citizens and businesses to engage in sustainable development and work together to achieve it. “There are a vast number of new and innovative ways to involve citizens and business in monitoring and generating information and to track progress,” he said.
The summit also hailed the release of the new citizen science section of the Unep, which allows people from around the world to contribute to certain crowdsourced projects.
Finally, several organisations suggested establishing special interest groups to bring together communities of experts to find solutions to specific data issues.
About 30 proposals were received during the conference, seven of which focus on specific data issues in the Arab region.
nalwasmi@thenational.ae
