Abu Dhabi: A summit in Abu Dhabi with over 650 delegates from several countries across the globe will discuss bridging the information gap policy- makers face in designing plans for sustainable development.
Representatives of government, UN bodies, the non-governmental sector, private sector, academia and civil society will gather in Abu Dhabi between October 6 and 8 for the Eye on Earth Summit 2015.
The experts will explore solutions and actions necessary for greater access to, and sharing of, environmental, social and economic data to support sustainable development. The summit will address the profound impact that rapid economic and industrial development is having on natural resources, biodiversity and consumption patterns around the world. These global challenges require international collaborative action to find transformative solutions that span political boundaries and help secure a sustainable future for all.
One of the critical first steps — and the focus of Eye on Earth Summit 2015 — is to address the need for evidence-based decision-making that can benefit from the available wealth of scientific data, information and knowledge, if these are made more accessible to all.
“Sustainable development across the globe is being hindered because policy-makers lack access to data that would improve decision-making,” said Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, Secretary-General of the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD).
Eye on Earth is a collaborative effort between the EAD and the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI), as well as the Eye on Earth Alliance, a partnership of organisations that aim to build and mobilise global support for access to environmental data.
As part of its ongoing expansion, the Alliance has recently grown to include, in addition to the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Resources Institute (WRI).
UN Under-Secretary-General and Unep Executive Director Achim Steiner said this year world leaders will convene for a number of major sustainable development events, among them are the Summit for the Adoption of the post-2015 development agenda and the climate change conference in Paris. The decisions made at these meetings will shape the way forward on sustainable development and climate action for years to come, he said.
“For leaders to make the right decisions in such global processes, reliable, ample and timely data is absolutely essential. One of Unep’s key roles has long been to work with partners to provide the data that informs this science-policy interface,” he added.
The announcement of the summit dates follows a meeting of representatives from the Eye on Earth community in Bonn, Germany to provide input on the development of indicators to track some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to discuss how to support the data and information needed to implement them. A set of 17 goals with 169 targets, the SDGs cover a broad range of sustainable development issues, including ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, making cities more sustainable, combating climate change, and protecting oceans and forests.
The work of Eye on Earth is expected to be pivotal in providing the necessary data required to measure the progress and impact of the SDGs, with current and future Special Initiative (SI) projects aligning closely with them to ensure the provision of relevant, timely and accessible information.
