The global interconnectedness via the internet and spread of communication technologies has offered humans a great deal of potential to achieve and accelerate their own growth + the overall society growth. These technologies are helping to bridge the digital divide and aid in the development of knowledge societies.
Our previous article featured how these communication technologies and global digitization can help achieve the UN sustainable development goals, this article continues to reflect on how each SDG and digitization are closely linked to overall human progress and development.
Read Part One: Achieving UN SDGs with Digitization
SDG 8 Decent work and economic growth
Sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work is what SDG 8 works on. Digitization has been a leading to help with day-to-day transformation of all sectors and bringing in many new forms of employment. One of the leading contributors to the over GDP as well, during pandemic this has helped the global community to stay connected and continue most of the work profile via many applications, software’s, and communication technologies. Offering people work from home, remote work and part-time work opportunities that offer decent work and employment with diversity, inclusivity, and a possibility for sustained growth for all.
SDG 9 Industry, innovation, and infrastructure.
This SDG focuses on building a resilient infrastructure, work to promote sustainable and inclusive industrialization, and foster innovation across sectors. Digitization plays a crucial role to help achieve these goals. When there is larger access to emerging information, academic research, more transparency to help brands, companies, and individuals to make informed decisions, and platforms are widely present for open collaboration for co-creation along with learning and work – there is more growth for all.
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SDG 10 Reduce inequalities
In a society where information, education and knowledge are easy to access for all – there is less inequality based on these fundamental rights. This can help countries with low information access to certain sections of the society where the only thing holding individuals back is lack of education or information. Digitization here helps to facilitate social and economic progress, especially to the disadvantaged segments of our society and people with different abilities.
SDG 11 Sustainable cities and communities
The focus here is to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. Digitization access offers cities smart technologies to work with, innovative infrastructure and application to access – smart building, smart water management, intelligent transport and mobility systems and overall increasing the efficiency in energy and resource waste management. A holistic city management is what w– all need.
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SDG 12 Responsible consumption and production
When we talk about SDG 12 – sustainable consumption and thoughtful/mindful production is key. Digitization can help us with innovations that offer us access to information and applications that have product-specific improvements – AI based solutions that offer increased dematerialization and virtualization especially in sectors like agriculture, mobility/transportation, energy, supply chain management and smart cities and towns.
SDG 13 Climate Action
Our world is in dire need of urgent action to combat climate change and its impact. When we think about digitization – application access in energy, transport, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and more will help to meet the challenges of climate change. For example, many start-ups and brands are focused on optimizing value chains, reducing resource usage, water, and emission by offering innovative alternate solutions. Others are aiding to foster resilience and climate adaptation with real-time weather information updates.
SDG 14 Life below water
SDG 14 is about conserving, saving and on how to sustainably use our oceans, seas, and marine resources. Communication technologies here can aid to achieve this through satellite management and monitoring. Big data here can be of help that is used to analyze biodiversity, pollution levels, weather changes and ecosystem evolution to help plan mitigation and adaptation strategies.
SDG 15 Life on land
We are aware that we need to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of our limited land resources – the terrestrial ecosystems, find more sustainable ways to manage forests, combat desertification and find ways to combat land degradation and biodiversity loss. With wider internet connectivity – there is an improved monitoring of our land, reporting regarding conservation and sustainable use of our land helping to prevent biodiversity loss. Big data here again plays a substantial role by helping to deeply analyze long and short-term trends to plan mitigation strategies.
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SDG 16 Peace, justice, and strong institutions
When communication technologies come to picture – they help to assist in crisis management, building peace via electronic monitoring. The use of open data helps to increase transparency, empowers the citizens to act while also driving economic growth.
SDG 17 Partnerships for the goals
Internet connectivity and communication technologies hold capabilities to strengthen the means of implementation for the SDGs. They foster international connectivity for cooperation, coordination, promoting technology transfer and capacity building. Offering us the ability to have multi-stake partnerships and enabling us to monitor data and build action plans with wide implementation possibilities.
We can understand from this how crucial digitization is for the overall growth of our planet, maintaining climate and reducing pollution, monitoring our waste, and implementing various solutions across the globe. It helps us to bring in advancements, meet our targets, analyze data, and more importantly offer services in basic areas of health, finance, education, and energy to all.
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