Workshop of the ICA Commission on Atlases
September 18th, 2-4 pm
EuroCarto, Vienna
Event format: Hybrid
Contacts:
René Sieber: sieberr@ethz.ch
Eric Losang: E_Losang@leibniz-ifl.de
In 2015, the United Nations defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an effort to make the broad social, economic, and environmental challenges more tangible. As a follow up to the eight Millennium Development Goals, identified in 2000, they represent an urgent call for action by all countries – whether developed or developing – in a global partnership.
The sheer scope of the challenges and facets is reflected in the numerous sub-goals which are operationalized through a vast set of defined indicators. For atlas producers, the constellation of global spatial effectiveness – multi-perspective approaches – countless quantitative data at first glance it may sounds like an easy task to produce an atlas regardless of the format and medium chosen. Unsurprisingly the World Bank – whose databases provide the lion’s share of the information related to the indicators identified as basis to assess the SDGs – already published analog and digital SDG Atlases in 2017, 2018 and 2020. Different initiatives already started SDG-Atlas projects such as Statistik Austria or the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment covering all SDGs or relate them to special topics.
So why talking about another SDG atlas? In 2021 another SDG-Atlas took a completely different approach. „SDGs in action – a generations‘ view“ was designed as a bilingual printed atlas that takes on the SDGs from a people’s point of view, expressing experiences and using qualitative rather than a mere quantitative data to visualize and to document how we experience today’s problems.
The workshop opens the discussion for new atlas concepts that aims to be understandable and usable for a variety of use cases and user groups. On the basis of short inputs and further interchange of ideas the workshop aspires to loosely formulate the structural outline and suggestion for content of an alternative and sustainable (!) SDG-Atlas, to be edited and compiled by the ICA Commission on Atlases (CoA), as one of their possible foci of work in the next years.
Ressources
Sustainable Develoment Goals
United Nation official SDG Website (website)
Examples of targets related to the goals
(here goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere) (website)
SDG Factsheet (PDF)
SDG Indicators
E-Handbook on Sustainable Development Goals Indicators
Reports
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022 (United Nations) (website)
Sustainable Development Report 2022 – and the related interactive maps (website)
Atlas projects
Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2018 (The World Bank) (PDF)
Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2020 (The World Bank) (website)
SDGs in action – a generations view (website)
SDGatlas – Statistic Austria (website)
Mapping Mining to the SDGs: An Atlas (PDF)
Further reading
Mapping for a sustainable world (Menno-Jan Kraak, Robert E. Roth, Britta Ricker, Ayako Kagawa and Guillaume Le Sourd), 141 pp. (PDF)
This is not an Atlas – A global collection of counter-cartographies. (website)