Earth observations for sustainable development goals monitoring based on essential variables and driver-pressure-state-impactresponse indicators

In recent years,researchers of different communities have increased their efforts in formalizing a set of measurements regularly collected for analysing changes in Drivers,States,Impacts and Responses of a given discipline.In some cases,different actors have converged in a minimum set of Essential Variables(EVs),such as for Climate,Biodiversity or Oceans.The definition of such EVs is an ongoing evolution and in extension(e.g.EVs for water)although some communities have not even started(e.g.agriculture and energy).This paper characterizes the Earth Observation(EO)networks and creates a graph representation of their relations.Secondly,this graph is enriched with the EVs produced by each network creating a knowledge base.Finally,an effort has been done to identify links between EVs and Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)indicators in a way that they indirectly connect the EO.An analysis to detect gaps in EO variables due to a lack of observational networks is performed.Several suggestions for improving SDG indicators framework by considering EVs are exposed,as well as proposing new necessary EVs and suggesting new EO based indicators.The complete graph is available in the ENEON website(http://www.eneon.net/graphev-sdg/).

GEOEssential–mainstreaming workflows from data sources to environment policy indicators with essential variables

When defining indicators on the environment,the use of existing initiatives should be a priority rather than redefining indicators each time.From an Information,Communication and Technology perspective,data interoperability and standardization are critical to improve data access and exchange as promoted by the Group on Earth Observations.GEOEssential is following an end-user driven approach by defining Essential Variables(EVs),as an intermediate value between environmental policy indicators and their appropriate data sources.From international to local scales,environmental policies and indicators are increasingly percolating down from the global to the local agendas.The scientific business processes for the generation of EVs and related indicators can be formalized in workflows specifying the necessary logical steps.To this aim,GEOEssential is developing a Virtual Laboratory the main objective of which is to instantiate conceptual workflows,which are stored in a dedicated knowledge base,generating executable workflows.To interpret and present the relevant outputs/results carried out by the different thematic workflows considered in GEOEssential(i.e.biodiversity,ecosystems,extractives,night light,and food-water-energy nexus),a Dashboard is built as a visual front-end.This is a valuable instrument to track progresses towards environmental policies.

Developing food,water and energy nexus workflows

There is a growing recognition of the interdependencies among the supply systems that rely upon food,water and energy.Billions of people lack safe and sufficient access to these systems,coupled with a rapidly growing global demand and increasing resource constraints.Modeling frameworks are considered one of the few means available to understand the complex interrelationships among the sectors,however development of nexus related frameworks has been limited.We describe three opensource models well known in their respective domains(i.e.TerrSysMP,WOFOST and SWAT)where components of each if combined could help decision-makers address the nexus issue.We propose as a first step the development of simple workflows utilizing essential variables and addressing components of the above-mentioned models which can act as building-blocks to be used ultimately in a comprehensive nexus model framework.The outputs of the workflows and the model framework are designed to address the SDGs.