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This in turn enables individuals, public and private institutions, and companies to make choices that are good for them and for the world they live in. This report sets out the main opportunities and risks presented by the data revolution for sustain-able development. Seizing these opportunities and mitigating these risks requires active choices, especially by governments and international institutions. Without immediate action, gaps between developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people, and between the private and public sectors will widen, and risks of harm and abuses of human rights will grow.
The strong leadership of the United Nations UN is vital for the success of this process. No one should be invisible. This is the world we want — a world that counts. Data are the lifeblood of decision-making. Without data, we cannot know how many people are born and at what age they die; how many men, women and children still live in poverty; how many children need educating; how many doctors to train or schools to build; how public money is being spent and to what effect; whether greenhouse gas emissions are increasing or the fish stocks in the ocean are dangerously low; how many people are in what kinds of work, what companies are trading and whether economic activity is expanding.
To know all this and more involves a systematic effort of finding out. It means seeking out high-quality data that can be used to compare outcomes and changes over time and between and within countries, and continuing to do so, year after year. It means careful planning, spending money on technical expertise, robust systems, and ever-changing technologies. As a result, more is known now about the state of the world and, particularly, the poorest people in it.
But despite this significant progress, huge data and knowledge gaps remain about some of the biggest challenges we face, and many people and groups still go uncounted. Months into the Ebola outbreak, for example, it is still hard to know how many people have died, or where. And now the stakes are rising. A huge increase in the capacity of many governments, institutions and individuals will be needed to deliver and use this data. Fortunately, this challenge comes together with a huge opportunity.
The volume of data in the world is increasing exponentially: Thanks to new technologies, the volume, level of detail, and speed of data available on societies, the economy and the environment is without precedent. Governments, companies, researchers and citizens groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data. This report calls on governments and the UN to act to enable data to play its full role in the realisation of sustainable development by closing key gaps in access and use of data: We hope it will also be helpful to Member States, the UN System as a whole, and to the large constituencies that support the three pillars of the UN: Revolutions begin with people, not with reports, and the data revolution is no different.
This report is not about how to create a data revolution — it is already happening — but how to mobilise it for sustainable development.
It is an urgent call for action to support the aspiration for sustainable development and avert risks, stop and reverse growing inequalities in access to data and information, and ensure that the promise of the data revolution is realised for all. These risks must be addressed.
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Fundamental elements of human rights have to be safeguarded: Some of this is well-founded. As more is known about people and the environment, there is a correspondingly greater risk that the data could be used to harm, rather than to help. People and societies can be harmed in less material, but nonetheless real ways if individuals are embarrassed or suffer social isolation as a result of information becoming public.
There is also a risk of growing inequality. Major gaps are already opening up between the data haves and have-nots. Many people are excluded from the new world of data and information by language, poverty, lack of education, lack of technology infrastructure, remoteness or prejudice and discrimination.
While the use of new technologies has exploded everywhere in the last ten years, the costs are still prohibitive for many. In several countries, the public sector is not keeping up with companies, which are increasingly able to collect, analyse and respond to real-time data as quickly as it is generated. According to McKinsey, African countries spend about 1. We believe that the data revolution can be a revolution for equality.
More, and more open, data can help ensure that knowledge is shared, creating a world of informed and empowered citizens, capable of holding decision-makers accountable for their actions. There are huge opportunities before us and change is already happening. But if our vision is of a world where data and information reduce rather than increase inequalities, we are still a long way from realising that ambition.
Without deliberate actions, the opportunities will be slower in coming and more unequally distributed when they arrive, and the risks will be greater. It is up to governments to put in place the rules and systems to realise this vision, working with domestic stakeholders and in the multilateral system, at regional and global levels.
Governments, through the legal systems they enforce, are the ultimate guarantors of the public good. It is governments — ideally working in collaboration with forward looking and socially responsible private institutions, civil society and academia — that can set and enforce legal frameworks to guarantee data privacy and security of data for individuals, and ensure its quality and independence.
It is governments that can balance public and private interests and create systems that foster incentives without creating unacceptable inequalities, adopt frameworks for safe and responsible use and manage the international system that can transfer finance and technical expertise to bring the least informed people and institutions up to the level of the most informed. And it is governments that are elected to respond to citizens on their choices and priorities.
New institutions, new actors, new ideas and new partnerships are needed, and all have something to offer the data revolution. In many cases, technical and financial investments will be needed to enable those changes to happen, and strong collaboration between public institutions and the private sector can help official agencies to jump straight to new technologies and ways of doing things.
To be realised, the SDGs will require a monitoring and accountability framework and a plan for implementation. The figure above presents a summary snapshot of current data availability in the MDG database as of October , covering 55 core indicators for developing countries or areas. The drop in data availability after demonstrates the extent of the time lags that persist between collection and release of data. There is considerable variation in data availability between indicators, where,for example, data on malaria indicators is very scarce, while for the ratio of girls to boys enrolled in primary, secondary and tertiary education there is relatively good country level data available for most countries and years though much remains to be done in tracking other indicators essential to monitoring educational outcomes.
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This has been one of the greatest achievements of MDG monitoring, and is testament to the tremendous efforts of many national and international organisations. Beyond the MDG indicators, other disturbing gaps exist. Entire groups of people and key issues remain invisible. Indigenous populations and slum dwellers for instance, are consistently left out of most data sets. It is still impossible to know with certainty how many disabled children are in school. Globally, the fact of birth has not been recorded for nearly million children under age five. In alone, 57 million infants — four out of every ten babies delivered worldwide that year — were not registered with civil authorities.
Many of the issues of most concern to women are poorly served by existing data; just over half of all countries report data on intimate partner violence, and where it is reported quality is not consistent, data is rarely collected from women over 49, and data are not comparable. Much more data are needed on the economic roles of women of all ages as caregivers to children, older persons and the disabled in the household and in the labour force. A lack of demographic and location information frequently hinders needs assessment and monitoring of the global response to emergencies.
The new goals will cover a wider range of environmental issues than the existing MDGs. Data on many environmental issues is particularly sparse. There is almost no useful data on chemical pollutants, despite toxic waste dumping being a serious environmental and health issue in some countries. Likewise, we lack sound and agreed-upon metrics for tracking excessive flows of reactive nitrogen.
It is quite clear that the monitoring of the SDGs will require substantial additional investment in order to consolidate gains made during the MDG era and to develop reliable, high-quality data on a range of new subjects, such as climate risk mitigation or inequality, ensuring that no groups are excluded, and with an unprecedented level of detail.
Data that are not used or not usable. To be useful, data must be of high quality, at a level of disaggregation that is appropriate to the issue at hand, and must be made accessible to those who want or need to use them. Too many countries still have data that are of insufficient quality to be useful in making decisions, holding governments to account or fostering innovation. Comparability and standardisation are crucial, as they allow data from different sources or time periods to be combined, and the more data can be combined, the more useful they are.
Combining data allows for changes of scale — e. It allows for comparison over time, if data on the same thing collected at different moments can be brought together to reveal trends. But too much data is still produced using different standards — household surveys that ask slightly different questions or geospatial data that uses different geographical definitions. And too little data are available at a level of disaggregation that is appropriate to policy makers trying to make decisions about local-level allocation or monitoring equitable outcomes across regions.
This prevents researchers, policy makers, companies or NGOs from realising the full value of the data produced. Data buried in pdf documents, for example, are much harder for potential users to work with; administrative data that are not transferred to statistical offices; data generated by the private sector or by academic researchers that are never released or data released too late to be useful; data that cannot be translated into action because of lack of operational tools to leverage them.
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This is a huge loss in terms of the benefits that could be gained from more open data and from being able to link data across different sectors. Data needs to be generated with users in mind. Too often data providers underinvest in identifying and engaging those in a position to use data to drive action. Agencies with a mandate to collect public information are not always well-suited to ensuring their information is used by stakeholders, while civil society and the private sector could play a critical role in translating data into a form that is more readily useable.
Too much that needs to be known remains unknown. Data could be used better to improve lives and increase the power and control that citizens have over their destinies. Data is a resource, an endless source of fuel for innovation that will power sustainable development, of which we must learn to become effective and responsible stewards.
Like any resource, it must be managed for the public good, and to ensure that the benefits flow to all people and not just the few. Data must be available, and must be turned into the information that can be confidently used by people to understand and improve their lives and the world around them. The world we need, if the data we have is to be used to the fullest to achieve sustainable development, is a world of data that is transformed in the following ways:. The rules, systems and investments that underpin how official data is collected and and managed should be focused on the needs of people, while protecting their rights as the producers of that information.
These data, and the information produced from them, should reflect what is important to people and the constraints and opportunities that affect their lives. This process should include all people — leaving no one out, and disaggregating in ways that allow the relevant differences and similarities between people and groups to be reflected in analysis and policy.
Rules and standards should be aimed at reducing information inequalities and providing the highest-quality information for all, in the most easily understood format. The priority should always be to use data and information to improve outcomes, experiences and possibilities for people in the short and long term. There must be respect for privacy and personal ownership of personal data, and mechanisms in place so that people themselves have access to the information and are able to make choices accordingly.
Crucially, people must have means for redress if they feel that they are being harmed or their rights infringed by the use of their data. If data is to be useful and support good decision-making, it has to be ready at the time when decisions are being made or where the opportunity for influencing the outcomes is there.
Trade-offs between timeliness and other quality dimensions depend on the purpose to which data is being put. New technologies and innovations provide the opportunity for the public sector, citizens groups, individuals and companies to have access to data that, with due regard for privacy, security and human rights, is aligned with their own decision making cycles and information needs — available when and how they want it — and strengthen policy planning, crisis early warning, programme operations, service delivery, impact evaluation, and disaster response.
Data for the future. Interdependence is not simply a local phenomenon. Rapid growth in production has extended it to the international plane, with both physical and economic manifestations. There are growing global and regional pollution effects, such as in the more than international river basins and the large number of shared seas. The enforcement of common interest often suffers because areas of political jurisdiction and areas of impact do not coincide. Energy policies in one jurisdiction cause acid precipitation in another. The fishing policies of one state affect the fish catch of another.
No supranational authority exists to resolve such issues, and the common interest can only be articulated through international cooperation. In the same way, the ability of a government to control its national economy is reduced by growing international economic interactions.
For example, foreign trade in commodities makes issues of carrying capacities and resource scarcities an international concern. If economic power and the benefit of trade were more egually distributed, common interests would be generally recognized. But the gains from trade are unequally distributed, and patterns of trade in, say, sugar affect not merely a local sugar-producing sector, but the economies and ecologies of the many developing countries that depend heavily on this product.
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The search for common interest would be less difficult if all development and environment problems had solutions that would leave everyone better off. This is seldom the case, and there are usually winners and losers. Many problems arise from inequalities in access to resources. An inequitable landownership structure can lead to overexploitation of resources in the smallest holdings, with harmful effects on both environment and development. Internationally, monopolistic control over resources can drive those who do not share in them to excessive exploitation of marginal resources.
The differing capacities of exploiters to commander 'free' goods — locally, nationally, and internationally — is another manifestation of unequal access to resources. As a system approaches ecological limits, inequalities sharpen. Thus when a watershed deteriorates, poor farmers suffer more because they cannot afford the same anti-erosion measures as richer farmers. When urban air quality deteriorates, the poor, in their more vulnerable areas, suffer more health damage than the rich, who usually live in more pristine neighbourhoods.
When mineral resources become depleted, late-comers to the industrialization process lose the benefits of low-cost supplies. Globally, wealthier nations are better placed financially and technologically to cope with the effects of possible climatic change. Hence, our inability to promote the common interest in sustainable development is often a product of the relative neglect of economic and social justice within and amongst nations.
The world must quickly design strategies that will allow nations to move from their present, often destructive, processes of growth and development onto sustainable development paths. This will require policy changes in all countries, with respect both to their own development and to their impacts on other nations' development possibilities. This chapter concerns itself with national strategies.
The required reorientation in international economic relations is dealt with in Chapter 3. Critical objectives for environment and development policies that follow from the concept of sustainable development include:. As indicated earlier, development that is sustainable has to address the problem of the large number of people who live in absolute poverty — that is, who are unable to satisfy even the most basic of their needs.
Poverty reduces people's capacity to, use resources in a sustainable manner; it intensifies pressure on the environment. Most such absolute poverty is in developing countries; in many, it has been aggravated by the economic stagnation of the s. A necessary but not a sufficient condition for the elimination of absolute poverty is a relatively rapid rise in per capita incomes in the Third World.
It is therefore essential that the stagnant or declining growth trends of this decade be reversed. While attainable growth rates will vary. It seems unlikely that, taking developing countries as a whole, these objectives can be accomplished with per capita income growth of under 3 per cent. Given current population growth rates, this would require overall national income growth of around 5 per cent a year in the developing economies of Asia, 5. Are these orders of magnitude attainable? The record in South and East Asia over the past quartet-century and especially over the last five years suggests that 5 per cent annual growth can be attained in most countries, including the two largest, India and China.
In Latin America, average growth rates on the order of 5 per cent were achieved during the s and s, but fell well below that in the first half of this decade, mainly because of the debt crisis. In Africa, growth rates during the s and s were around As industrialized nations use less materials and energy, however, they will provide smaller markets for commodities and minerals from the developing nations. Yet if developing nations focus their efforts upon eliminating poverty and satisfying essential human needs.
Hence the very logic or sustainable development implies an internal stimulus to Third World growth. Nontheless, in large numbers of developing countries markets are very small; and for all developing countries high export growth. Thus a reorientation of international economic relations will be necessary for sustainable development, as discussed in Chapter 3. Sustainable development involves more than growth, it requires a change in the content of growth, to make it less material- and energy-intensive and more equitable in its impact.
These changes are required in all countries as part at a package of measures to maintain the stock or ecological capital, to improve the distribution of income, and to reduce the degree of vulnerability to economic crises. The process or economic development must be more soundly based upon the realities or the stock or capital that sustains it.
This in rarely done in either developed or developing countries. For example income from forestry operations is conventionally measured in terms of the value of timber and other products extracted. The costs or regenerating the forest are not taken into account, unless money is actually spent on such work. Thus figuring profits from logging rarely takes full account of the losses in future revenue incurred through degradation of the forest. Similar incomplete accounting occurs in the exploitation of other natural resources, especially in the case or resources that are not capitalized in enterprise or national accounts: People have acquired, often for the first time in history, both an idea of their relative poverty and a desire to emerqe from it and improve the quality of their lives.
As people advance materially, and eat and llve better, what were once luxuries tend to be regarded as necessities. The net result is that the demand for food, raw materials, and power increases to an even greater degree than the population. Economic development is unsustainable if it increases vulnerability to crises. A drought may force farmers to slaughter animals needed for sustaining production in future years. A drop in prices may cause farmers or other producers to over exploit natural resources to maintain incomes.
But vulnerability can be reduced by using technologies that lower production risks, by choosing institutional options that reduce market fluctuations, and by building up reserves, especially of food and foreign exchange. A development path that combines growth with reduced vulnerability is more sustainable than one that does not.
Yet it is not enough to broaden the range of economic variables taken into account. Sustainability requires views of human needs and well-being that incorporate such non-economic variables as education and health enjoyed for their own sake, clean air and water, and the protection of natural beauty. It must also work to remove disabilities from disadvantaged groups, many of whom live in ecologically vulnerable areas, such as many tribal groups in forests, desert nomads, groups in remote hill areas, and indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia.
Changing the quality of growth requires changing our approach to development efforts to take account of all of their effects. For instance, a hydropower project should not be seen merely as a way of producing more electricity: Thus the abandonment of a hydro project because it will disturb a rare ecological system could be a measure of progress, not a setback to development.
Economic and social development can and should be mutually reinforcing. Money spent on education and health can raise human productivity. Economic development can accelerate social development by providing opportunities for underprivileged groups or by spreading education more rapidly. The satisfaction of human needs and aspirations is so obviously an objective of productive activity that it may appear redundant to assert its central role in the concept of sustainable development. All too often poverty is such that people cannot satisfy their needs for survival and well-being even if goods and services are available.
At the same time, the demands of those not in poverty may have major environmental consequences. The principal development challenge is to meet the needs and aspirations of an expanding developing world population. The most basic of all needs is for a livelihood: Between and the labour force in developing countries will increase by nearly 6O0 million, and new livelihood opportunities will have to be generated for 60 million persons every ear. More food is required not merely to feed more people but to attack undernourishment. For the developing world to eat, person for person, as well as the industrial world by the year , annual increases of 5.
Though the focus at present is necessarily on staple foods, the projections given above also highlight the need for a high rate of growth of protein availability. In Africa, the task is particularly challenging given the recent declining per capita food production and the current constraints on growth. In Asia and Latin America, the required growth rates in calorie and protein consumption seem to be more readily attainable.
But increased food production should not be based on ecologically unsound production policies and compromise long-term prospects for food security. In the developing world, mostly in the Third World, we realize that the main problem we have is that we do not have employment opportunities, and most or these people who are unemployed move from rural areas and they migrate into the cities and those who remain behind always indulge in processes — for example charcoal burning - and all this leads to deforestation.
So maybe the environmental organizations should step in and look or ways to prevent this kind or destruction. The linked basic needs of housing, water supply, sanitation, and health care are also environmentally important, Deficiencies in these areas are often visible manifestations of environmental stress. In the Third World, the failure to meet these key needs is one or the major causes or many communicable diseases in such as malaria, gastro-intestinal infestations, cholera, and typhoid. Population growth and the drift into cities threaten to make there problems worse.
Planners must find ways or relying more on supporting community initiatives and self-help efforts and on effectively using low-cost technologies. The sustainability of development is intimately linked to the dynamic: The issue however, is not simply one of global population size. A child born in a country where levels or material and energy use are high place a greater burden on the Earth's resources than a child born in a poorer country.
A similar argument applies within countries. Nonetheless, sustainable development can be pursued more easily when population sizeis stabilized at a level consistent with the productive capacity of the ecosystem. In industrial countries, the overall rate of population growth is under 1 per cent, and several countries have reached or are approaching zero population growth. The total population or the industrialized world could increase from its current l 2 billion to about 1.
The greater part or global population increase will take place in developing countries, where the population of 3. Hence the challenge now is to quickly lower population growth rates, especially in regions such as Africa, where these rates are increasing. Birth rates declined in industrial countries largely because at economic and social development. Rising levels or income and urbanization and the changing role or women all played important roles. Similar processes are now at work in developing countries.
These should be recognized and encouraged. Population policies should be integrated with other economic and social development programmes — female education, health care, and the expansion of the livelihood base of the poor. But time is short, and developing countries will also have to promote direct measures to reduce fertility, to avoid going radically beyond the productive potential to support their populations.
In fact, increased access to family planning services is itself a form of social development that allows couples, and women in particular, the right to self-determination. Population growth in developing countries will remain unevenly distributed between rural and urban areas. UN projections suggest that by the first decade or the next century, the absolute size or rural populations in most developing countries will start-de-lining. Nearly 90 per cent of the increase in the developing world will take place in urban areas, the population or which in expected to rise from 1.
Developing-country cities are growing much faster than the capacity of authorities to cope. Shortages or housing, water. A growing proportion of city-dwellers live in slums and shanty towns, many of them exposed to air and water pollution and to industrial and natural hazards. Further deterioration is likely, given that most urban growth will take place in the largest cities.
Thus more manageable cities may be the principal gain from slower rates or population growth.
Urbanization is itself part or the development process. The challenge is to manage the process so as to avoid a severe deterioration in the quality of life. Thus the development of smaller urban centres needs to be encouraged to reduce pressures in large cities. It needs are to be pier on a sustainable basis the Earth's natural resource base must be conserved and enhanced. Major changes in policies will he needed to cope with the industrial world's current high levels or consumption, the increases in consumption needed to meet minimum standards in developing countries, and expected population growth.
However, the case for the conservation or nature should not rest only with development goals. It is part of our moral obligation to other living beings and future generations. Pressure on resources increases when people lack alternatives. Development policies must widen people's options for earning s sustainable livelihood, particularly for resource-poor households and in areas under ecological stress.
In a hilly area, for instance, economic self-interest and ecology can be combined by helping farmers shift from grain to tree crops by providing them with advice. Programmes to protect the incomes of farmers, fishermen, and foresters against short-term price declines may decrease their need to overexploit resources.
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The conservation of agricultural resources is an urge, task because in many parts of the world cultivation has already been extended to marginal lands, and fishery and forestry resourcing have been overexploited. These resources must be conserved and enhanced to meet the needs of growing populations. Land use in agriculture and forestry must be based on a scientific assessment of land capacity, and the annual depletion of topsoil, fish stock, or forest resources must not exceed the rate of regeneration.
The pressures on agricultural land from crop and livestock production can be partly relieved by increasing productivity. Ecologically more benign alternatives are available. Future increases in productivity, in both developed and developing countries, should be based on the better controlled application of water and agrichemicals, as well as on more extensive use of organic mannures and non-chemical means of pest control.
These alternatives can be promoted only by an agricultural policy based on ecological realities. In the case of fisheries and tropical forestry, we rely largely on the exploitation of the naturally available stocks. The sustainable yield from these stocks may well fall short of demand. Hence it will be necessary to turn to methods produce more fish, fuelwood, and forest products under controlled conditions.
Substitutes for fuelwood can be promoted. We live from this forest they want to destroy. And we want to take this opportunity of having so many people here gathered with the same objective in mind to defend our habitat, the conservation of forest, of tropical forest. In my area, we have about native products that we extract from the forest, besides all the other activities we have. So I think this must be preserved. Because it is not only with cattle, not only with pasture lands, and not only with highways that we will be able to develop the Amazon. When they think of falling trees, they always think building roads and the roads bring destruction under a mask called progress.
Let us put this progress where the lands have already been deforested, where it is idle of labour and where we have to find people work, and where we have to make the city grow. But let us leave those who want to live in the forest, who want to keep it as it is. We have nothing written. I don't have anything that was created in somebody's office. There is no philosophy. It is just the real truth, because this is what our life is. Some of these problems can be met by increased use of renewable energy sources.
But the exploitation of renewable sources such as fuelwood and hydropower also entails ecological problems. Hence sustainability requires a clear focus on conserving and efficiently using energy. Industrialized countries must recognize that their energy consumption is polluting the biosphere and eating into scarce fossil fuel supplies. Recent improvements in energy efficiency and a shift towards less energy-intensive sectors have helped limit consumption. But the process must be accelerated to reduce per capita consumption and encourage a shift to non-polluting sources and technologies.
The simple duplication in the developing world of industrial countries' energy use patterns is neither feasible nor desirable. Changing these patterns for the better will call for new policies in urban development, industry location, housing design, transportation systems, and the choice of agricultural and industrial technologies. Indigenous people are the base of what I guess could be called the environmental security system.
We are the gate-keeper of success or failure to husband our resources. For many of us, however, the last few centuries have meant a major loss of control over our lands and waters. We are still the first to know about changes in the environment, but we are now the last to be asked or consulted. We are the first to detect when the forests are being threatened. And we are the last to be asked about the future of our forests. We are the first to feel the pollution of our waters, as the Ojibway peoples of my own homelands in northern Ontario will attest.
And, of course, we are the last to be consulted about how, when, and where developments should take place in order to assure continuing harmony for the seventh generation. The most we have learned to expect is to be compensated, always too late and too little. We are seldom asked to help avoid the need for compensation by lending our expertise and our consent to development. The prevention and reduction of air and water pollution will remain a critical task of resource conservation.
Air and water quality come under pressure from such activities as fertilizer and pesticide use. Each of these is expected to increase the pollution lead on the biosphere substantially, particularly in developing countries. Cleaning up after the event is an expensive solution.