Speakers Bio & Abstract

Biography
Greg leads the Secretariat for the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM), providing strategic policy advice and leadership in the coordination and implementation of UN-GGIM initiatives with Member States and related International Organizations involved in national, regional and global geospatial information management. He is also responsible for developing the substantive content for the Committee of Experts, High Level Forum's, international technical capacity development workshops, and other international fora.Abstract
Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals with Geospatial InformationAnchored by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 169 targets and a global indicator framework, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development specifically demands the need for new data acquisition and integration approaches to improve the availability, quality, timeliness and disaggregation of data to support implementation at all levels ? including to exploit the contribution to be made by a wide range of data, including Earth observations and geospatial information. Although the development of the global indicator framework has primarily been based on a statistical data input-output approach, the need for ?geographic location? in a new era of data needs is well recognized. Many national statistical offices now understand that geospatial information, Earth observations and other Big Data are able to provide new and consistent data sources and methodologies to integrate multiple ?location-based? variables to support and inform official statistics and the indicators for the SDGs. These methods are able to fill data gaps and/or improve the temporal and spatial resolutions of data, by bringing together information from various sources, particularly those related to the environment. This presentation will discuss and elaborate on these geographic integration concepts.