Our rapidly urbanizing world requires continuous monitoring of urban transformations both in time and space, and constantly ensuring that we use the resulting knowledge for informed policies and actions to advance progress towards sustainable urbanization. Urbanization manifests both spatially and demographically, and at scales ranging from the neighborhood to the city, national and global scales. The rate at which the demographic and spatial changes happen at the different scales requires continuous monitoring through well-established local monitoring systems, which can often be costly and time-consuming. Space applications and related analytics offer accessible, affordable, reliable and consistent ways to understand urban changes at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales, which is furthered by advances in the free and open sharing of imagery and processing/ analytical methods.
UN-Habitat's work in supporting continuous urban monitoring against the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the new urban agenda (NUA) and the harmonized urban monitoring framework integrates space-science-based measurements, particularly those which rely on satellite imagery for land cover/ land use classification and built-up areas extraction. The information extracted from these analyses is used for indicator specific applications, such as understanding urban trends, population distributions and their proximities to urban spaces and services, understanding of spatial inequalities and climate risks, among others; all of which directly contribute to the agenda of leaving no one and no place behind.
To advance the use of space resources for continuous urban monitoring and informed decision making, UN-Habitat in collaboration with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and Earth Observations for the Sustainable Development Goals (EO4SDG) developed the Earth Observation Toolkit for sustainable cities and human settlements in 2020. The toolkit was developed with contributions from more than 40 organizations, including representatives from space agencies (NASA, ESA), national statistical systems, city authorities, academia, research institutions, the private sector and independent Earth observation data producers.
The Toolkit aims to demonstrate the value of earth observations (EO) and geospatial analysis and make available, in one central place, resources that are directly relevant to monitoring progress against the SDGs and NUA and contributing to timely and informed decision making. The Toolkit contains resources, such as data, tools, use cases and learning opportunities, that are related to spatial manifestation of urbanization, housing, open spaces, and urban public transport. The Toolkit's four priority areas include: impact, awareness-building, bench-learning across levels and promoting fair practices for data provision and use.
As a resource developed through contributions from countries and cities, the use cases component of the Toolkit showcases direct applications of EO in the monitoring of progress against SDG 11 targets at the national and local city levels from across the world. Examples from the Toolkit are drawn from Colombia, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Uganda, and also includes global level applications for resources such as OpenStreetMap. These use cases vary in scale and types of applications for EO resources in urban monitoring, with featured uses including those on spatial changes in urban areas, access to green and public open spaces, air quality, public transport, and also feature technologies used for the measurements.
The Toolkit's contributing community has continued to grow, and so has the richness and variety of its resources especially the data, tools, and use case that it offers.
Visit the Toolkit here: https://eotoolkit.unhabitat.org/
Contact person: Robert.ndugwa[at]un.org and dennis.mwaniki[at]un.org