Digital tech critical to UN sustainable development goals

As the adverse effects of climate change increase dramatically in tandem with other global concerns, heightened use of digital technologies can contribute to a more sustainable future, according to a new report.

Company leaders have to work across organisations to use these powerful tools with a purposeful mission to enact meaningful, worldwide change.

Four years ago, the United Nations (U.N.) created a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that represent a consensus-driven agenda for human progress. Framed by the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and adopted by world leaders at a historic U.N. summit in 2015, the SDGs comprise 17 goals and 169 targets that detail the critical challenges facing humanity – and how to respond.

However, despite progress in some areas, the world will likely fall short on delivering on most of these goals by 2030. Global carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions continue to increase, environmental instabilities are growing more evident, and societal ills such as poverty, hunger, water scarcity, unemployment, and inequality plague populations around the world. Climate action, in particular, is a foremost component of the SDGs, transcending geography and demanding truly integrated solutions.

Developed and deployed correctly, digital technologies are powerful tools that can have a transformational effect on the SDGs, according to “Digital with Purpose: Delivering a SMARTer 2030,” a new report by the Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and Deloitte. The report identifies and quantifies how technologies can help governments, businesses, and philanthropic organisations accelerate their efforts to achieve each of the 17 SDGs. Its analysis of a broad range of SDG targets, including 20 particular targets and 25 associated indicators, finds that further deployment of existing digital technologies will, on average, help accelerate progress toward the SDGs by 22% and mitigate downward trends by 23%.

There is, however, much more to be done, according to the report: While increased adoption of digital technologies can help close the gap to some 2030 targets, performance against eight of the 25 indicators analysed is still expected to deteriorate. The report examines critical roles for the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and related stakeholders in developing and deploying digital technologies to maximise positive impact and minimise harmful consequences.

“Digital technologies can galvanise our efforts to confront the massive challenges we face globally,” says Sam Baker, a partner in purpose and sustainability strategy consulting with Deloitte UK and co-author of the report. “Company leaders have to work across organisations to use these powerful tools with a purposeful mission to enact meaningful, worldwide change.”

As technology stewards, CIOs play a vital role in evaluating when, where, and how to adopt the most pertinent and applicable technologies, and in determining how these new tools may shift their business and organisational performance across multiple dimensions—including toward fulfilling the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

Technologies for the Greater Good

Focusing on 103 of the 169 SDG targets not primarily reliant on policy, aid financing, or nondigital interventions, the report draws on numerous examples and case studies of ICT sector sustainability efforts to illustrate how seven digital technologies can have significant, tangible effects on the world: digital access, faster internet, the cloud, the internet of things (IoT), cognitive, digital reality, and blockchain.

These technologies can pave the way for a number of beneficial activities. They can help in connecting citizens around the world; supporting the monitoring and tracking of human impacts on the environment; optimising inefficient and energy-intensive industrial processes; and augmenting actions people carry out in support of sustainability goals, among many others.

To navigate these effects, the report identifies four top-level impact functions that serve as a framework to explain and characterise the contributions digital technologies can make toward achieving SDG targets:

• Connect and communicate

– the connection of people to each other and to critical information.

• Monitor and track

– the realtime, extensive observation of the world and its natural and manmade systems.

• Analyse, optimise, and pre

dict – the development and use

of insights from data to drive process efficiencies and infer the future.

• Augment and automate

– the creation of a bridge between digital and physical, from simulation through augmentation to the creation of autonomous systems.

In particular, the report looks at how digital technologies may introduce opportunities – as well as potential negative effects – in the following domains:

Biosphere. Digital technologies can help to protect the biosphere and reverse some negative effects against it. The most relevant impacts are in monitoring and tracking the state of the natural world, and in analysing and optimising energy and material usage across sectors to minimise climate change. There will be increasing opportunities for emission savings as processes across the agriculture, industrial, and manufacturing sectors become more sophisticated and automated. These widespread technological deployments, however, may also lead to increased emissions and e-waste resulting from the proliferation of IoT devices, for example.

Society. Digital technologies can help contribute to sustainable, equitable, and inclusive societies. Opportunities include connecting the unconnected and vulnerable in both developing and developed countries to basic digital access to enable financial education and empowerment; taking advantage of machine learning, AI, and the cloud’s computing power to accelerate drug and crop development and address issues related to poverty and hunger, disaster impact, and education and health care; and employing autonomous machines to transform agriculture, city utilities, and other areas. Possible negative outcomes include continued uneven access to technology, the spread of disinformation, and reduced systems resilience without adequate investment in cybersecurity.

Economy.

Digital technologies can foster inclusive growth and sustainable industry. Two major opportunities that stand out are monitoring supply chains more accurately to create transparency in production and optimising processes to increase productivity while reducing energy and material usage and emissions. For example, the report estimates that global manufacturing value added per capita could increase from around $1,800 currently to more than $2,700 in 2030, with 22% of the growth attributable to Industry 4.0 technologies. However, ramping up digital technologies may also result in job displacement and a greater divide between developed and less developed economies as automation spreads, among other risks.

Pursuing Digital with Purpose The ICT and partner sectors can significantly shift the extent to which the 2030 Agenda is truly a common focus; in doing so, ICT has an opportunity to set an example for partner sectors and to collaborate with governments, policymakers, and other stakeholders. Working in tandem, these sectors can develop a systemic understanding of the potential impacts of digital technologies and spur efforts to more effectively accelerate the benefits and limit the downsides.