Analysing trade-offs and synergies between SDGs for urban development, food security and poverty alleviation in rapidly changing peri-urban areas: a tool to support inclusive urban planning

Transitional peri-urban contexts are frontiers for sustainable development where land-use change involves negotiation and contestation between diverse interest groups. Multiple, complex trade-offs between outcomes emerge which have both negative and positive impacts on progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These trade-offs are often overlooked in policy and planning processes which depend on top-down expert perspectives and rely on course grain aggregate data which does not reflect complex peri-urban dynamics or the rapid pace of change. Tools are required to address this gap, integrate data from diverse perspectives and inform more inclusive planning processes. In this paper, we draw on a reinterpretation of empirical data concerned with land-use change and multiple dimensions of food security from the city of Wuhan in China to illustrate some of the complex trade-offs between SDG goals that tend to be overlooked with current planning approaches. We then describe the development of an interactive web-based tool that implements deep learning methods for fine-grained land-use classification of high-resolution remote sensing imagery and integrates this with a flexible method for rapid trade-off analysis of land-use change scenarios. The development and potential use of the tool are illustrated using data from the Wuhan case study example. This tool has the potential to support participatory planning processes by providing a platform for multiple stakeholders to explore the implications of planning decisions and land-use policies. Used alongside other planning, engagement and ecosystem service mapping tools it can help to reveal invisible trade-offs and foreground the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. This is vital for building approaches which recognise how trade-offs between the achievement of SDGs can be influenced by development interventions

The role of earth observation in an integrated deprived area mapping “system” for low-to-middle income countries

Urbanization in the global South has been accompanied by the proliferation of vast informal and marginalized urban areas that lack access to essential services and infrastructure. UN-Habitat estimates that close to a billion people currently live in these deprived and informal urban settlements, generally grouped under the term of urban slums. Two major knowledge gaps undermine the efforts to monitor progress towards the corresponding sustainable development goal (i.e., SDG 11—Sustainable Cities and Communities). First, the data available for cities worldwide is patchy and insufficient to differentiate between the diversity of urban areas with respect to their access to essential services and their specific infrastructure needs. Second, existing approaches used to map deprived areas (i.e., aggregated household data, Earth observation (EO), and community-driven data collection) are mostly siloed, and, individually, they often lack transferability and scalability and fail to include the opinions of different interest groups. In particular, EO-based-deprived area mapping approaches are mostly top-down, with very little attention given to ground information and interaction with urban communities and stakeholders. Existing top-down methods should be complemented with bottom-up approaches to produce routinely updated, accurate, and timely deprived area maps. In this review, we first assess the strengths and limitations of existing deprived area mapping methods. We then propose an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDeAMapS) framework that leverages the strengths of EO- and community-based approaches. The proposed framework offers a way forward to map deprived areas globally, routinely, and with maximum accuracy to support SDG 11 monitoring and the needs of different interest groups

Annual Report: 2013

I submit herewith the annual reports from the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks, for the period ending December 31, 2013. This is done in accordance with an act of Congress, approved March 2, 1887, entitled, “An act to establish agricultural experiment stations, in connection with the agricultural college established in the several states under the provisions of an act approved July 2, 1862, and under the acts supplementary thereto,” and also of the act of the Alaska Territorial Legislature, approved March 12, 1935, accepting the provisions of the act of Congress. The research reports are organized according to our strategic plan and by broad subject, focusing on geography, high-latitude agriculture, forest sciences, and the interaction of humans and the environment. Research conducted by our graduate and undergraduate students plays an important role in these grants and the impact they make on Alaska.Financial Statement -- Funding & Grants -- Students -- Research at SNRAS & AFES -- Publications -- Facult

A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues

Citizen sensing is an approach that develops and uses lightweight technologies with local communities to collect, share and act upon data. In doing so it enables them to become more aware of how they can tackle local issues. We report here on the development and uptake of the 'City- Commons Framework for Citizen Sensing', a conceptual model that builds on Participatory Action Research with the aim of playing an integrating role: outlining the processes and mechanisms for ensuring sensing technologies are co-designed by citizens to address their concerns. At the heart of the framework is the idea of a city commons: a pool of community-managed resources. We discuss how the framework was used by communities in Bristol to measure and monitor the problem of damp housing