Information and Communications Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals: State-of-the-Art, Needs and Perspectives

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

In September 2015, the agenda of sustainable development by 2030 [1] was approved in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Summit held in New York. This summit proposed a new indicator framework, associated with the global and universal indicators, for international cooperations to achieve sustainable development between 2015 and 2030, which, totally, include 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are shown in Fig. 1, and 169 targets. This new agenda actually continues the well known Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted in 2000 [2], which had been formulated through a Member State-led procedure with wide participation from the major groups and civil public society. The new SDGs framework benefits from the extensive experiences obtained from the implementation of MDGs, and also carries forward partial MDGs unaccomplished and sustains the momentum yielded via addressing the new emerging challenges on equity and urbanization. This further advances the global partnership as well as reflects the continuity and consolidation of MDGs while enabling them to be more sustainable via strengthening the environmental SDGs [3]. Although none of the 17 SDGs particularly refers to Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), and only several targets mention ICTs and relevant technologies, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development still claims that the ICTs can substantially accelerate the development progress of human beings, and may greatly bridge the digital gaps, so as to construct knowledge communities [1]. Fig. 1.

17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the 2030 agenda for sustainable development [1].