Collection
Data for Good: Promoting Data-Driven Nexus Approaches to Sustainability
Pressing global sustainability challenges necessitate intensifying national and international inter- and transdisciplinary efforts to develop effective means to address them. Fulfillment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 call for a nexus approach that considers the interrelation and interdependent dynamics and complexity of coupled human-environment systems. Data collection, data analytics, and data science can play a critical role in empowering the nexus approach to sustainability.
With this call for submissions, the SNF wants to provide a forum for innovative and forward-looking contributions that link data, informatics, and emerging data analytics tools with sustainability and can facilitate the process of addressing the pressing environmental and sustainability challenges humanity faces. The topic collection contributes to an open scholarly debate between camps (e.g., in data science, natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences) that are not yet well connected.
Submissions are welcomed from researchers and thought leaders whose contributions can equip stakeholders with the required vision to empower nexus thinking and decision-making to tackle sustainability challenges with data. We especially encourage submissions from the decision-making and business communities as the future “beneficiaries of data-driven nexus approaches to sustainability” to help us identify the major data-related gaps and challenges that need to be addressed.
Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Innovative approaches in data analysis that enhance the nexus approach to sustainability, e.g., via developing insights using data mining and harvesting, artificial intelligence (AI), data fusion, modelling, data processing in various forms, forecasting, or data visualization techniques
- Digitization and application of digital tools for accelerating sustainable development
- The new frontiers, opportunities, risks and challenges of digital change and datafication to enable us to understand and enhance our global sustainability agenda
- Methods to address the challenges in data acquisition, data storage, data sharing and access including open-data policies, data application or improved networking, data security and privacy, data mining, and data management in sustainability science
- Best and frontrunner cases for institutional updates to allow for data usage for sustainability goals
- Extracting sustainability information out of data
- Data-driven decision support systems for informed sustainability decision-making under uncertainty
- Turning data into societal sustainability knowledge
- Critical perspectives on data-driven approaches to sustainability challenges and broader societal issue areas
- Citizen sustainability science
- Dealing with missing sustainability data, misinformation, and echo chambers
- Behavioral sustainability data and tools for promoting sustainability
- Sustainable use of data and digital methods, e.g. green IT and green AI
- Possible contributions of the data science community to achieving the SDGs by 2030
- Sustainability data standards, assessment, and quality control
- Data contribution to fulfilling environmental justice
Authors are invited to submit through the Springer online system (if you are a new author to the system, you will be required to create a system login)
Editors
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Prof. Tshilidzi Marwala
United Nations University, Japan
Email: rector@unu.edu
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Prof. Kaveh Madani
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Canada
Email: madani@unu.edu
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Dr. Marcel Dorsch
German Environment Agency (UBA), Germany
Email: marcel.dorsch@uba.de
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Prof. Serena Coetzee
University of Pretoria, South Africa,
Email: serena.coetzee@up.ac.za
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Prof. Timothy Dube
University of the Western Cape, South Africa,
Email: tidube@unu.edu
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Dr. Azin Zarei
United Nations University Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources (UNU-FLORES), Germany,
Email: zarei@unu.edu
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Dr. Mir Matin
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Canada
Email: mir.matin@unu.edu
https://unu.edu/inweh/about/expert/mir-matin
