The Esri Team on sustainable development goals are in the Philippines to work with GEODATA SYSTEMS in their presentation before the 2017 International Conference on Sustainable Development Goals Statistics to be held October 4-6, 2017 at the Peninsula Manila.

The conference was organized by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in collaboration with the UN Statistics Division (UNSD)

The Esri Team is composed of Depti Koochar, Linda Peters, Charles Brigham, Audrey Bong and Brett Dixon. The GEODATA SYSTEMS Team is composed of Francisca Nasol-Dayrit, Wilma, Lara, Celete Dy-Donato and Elaine Ocampo.

The joint Esri-GEODATA SYSTEMS sustainable development team will present their research exercise “Establishment of Federated Information System for the Sustainable Development Goals”. The presentation is meant to review and refine the overall vision and objectives of the project; take stock of progress by Phase 1 countries and the United Nations Statistics Division; share lessons learned and identify needs to ensure the project’s success.

As a background, Esri is a member of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data which was organized by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). As the global leader in GIS technology, Esri will provide the ArcGIS Platform to least-developed countries for the collection, management, monitoring, and use of sustainable development goals data. The ArcGIS Platform will also provide content such as the digital Living Atlas of the World, which includes imagery, social, urban system, economic, and environmental data that can enrich understanding and inform decision-making.

UN experts have acknowledge the fact that geographic information about people and the planet is critical to making better decisions and using resources more wisely, if not, vital in achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals that countries have recently agreed on.

UN experts, like Tim Trainor, co-chair of the UN Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) said “there’s a recognition of the need and the benefit that can be realized from this kind of activity. If you look at the Sustainable Development Goals that world leaders have adopted, all of them deal with information and all of that information has some relationship to where those events or where those activities are happening on the Earth. In order to make the Sustainable Development Goals really meaningful, they have to know where these events are happening.”