Demonstrating the potential of Remote Sensing to support Sustainable Development Goals implementation: Case studies over Greece

The international community has recently agreed on the need to address global challenges related to environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, inequality, prosperity, and peace and justice. The United Nations Agenda 2030 sets 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are monitored through 169 societal targets and 232 Indicators that should be accomplished till 2030, in order to ensure sustainability of the systems and the resources for the future generations. Monitoring of this progress can be implemented through the concept of the Essential Variables (EVs) defined as the minimum set of variables required to characterize a change of a system. Remote Sensing, providing multi-scale, multispectral and multi-temporal wide coverage of earth's surface, can facilitate the monitoring of EVs trends over space and time. While global initiatives and research projects are currently work on streamlining the use of remote sensing data to the SDGs and EVs monitoring process, challenges exist on the identification and the selection of the proper variables and Indicators as well as on the efficient processing of large data volumes delivering robust and comprehensible information to policy makers and managers. This study serves as a pilot for the use of EVs quantifying changes in two Indicators of SDGs over terrestrial (SDG 15) and marine ecosystems (SDG 6). Two different Mediterranean sites are selected, and a process based on multi-temporal datasets of freely available satellite imagery is used in order to identify the trends for the selected Indicators.