Leveraging on open technologies to collaboratively reach the SDGs, the municipality of Los Angeles developed an open-source platform for collecting and analysing SDG indicators at the city level. The city became the first in the world to take this approach, serving as a blueprint and making the code freely available for other cities with similar goals.

In October 2017, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti made a pledge: The second-largest US city would strive to meet the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

LA’s move came amid a wave of commitments to the SDGs, also known as the Global Goals, since they were adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015.

There was only one problem: The 17 SDGs and their 169 targets were designed by countries, for countries. Cities were welcome to pledge their support, but they were not front and centre in the carefully crafted and negotiated document known as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in subsequent efforts like the adoption of an indicator framework by the United Nations Statistical Commission.

By addressing root causes, the concept of a circular economy provides much promise to accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda and achieve multiple SDGs such as SDGs 6 on energy, 8 on economic growth, 11 on sustainable cities, 12 on sustainable consumption and production, 13 on climate change, 14 on oceans, and 15 on life on land.

LA’s first move was to enlist the help of outside entities that had relevant knowledge and expertise. In February 2018, the city entered into partnership agreements with a political economy institute at LA university Occidental College and with the World Council on City Data.

These partnerships made LA one of eight hub cities around the world that agree to share data collected in the development of local SDG indicators. The city also sought to develop baseline measurements by conducting an inventory of existing city plans that touch on the various aspects of the SDGs.

Over the nearly four years since the mayor made that pledge, Los Angeles has developed an open-source platform for collecting and analysing SDG indicators at the local level. As an open-source tool, LA created the template that it lacked when first pursuing this exercise in the hopes of paving the way for other cities to more easily track their progress on the SDGs.

In 2019, the city also submitted a Voluntary Local Review to the UN High-Level Political Forum and launched an SDG Activity Index as a public encyclopedia of local entities across the public, private, philanthropic, grassroots, and charitable sectors that are pursuing efforts to improve SDG-related outcomes in the city.

The LA Open SDG data platform went live in July 2019 and it currently collects 159 indicators, which is 60 more than the US government’s portal SDG.gov.

In words of Elettra Baldi of Open Data Watch: “Los Angeles is the first city in the world to report SDG data at such a granular level using an open-source platform, this is important because it serves as a blueprint for other cities that want to adopt the SDGs locally. They created the portal using GitHub, a free software, and other cities can reuse the code used to build the SDG platform for free. This is a crucial step that LA has taken to ensure that other cities can replicate their portal.”

What at first seemed like a monumental task slowly but surely became more manageable as LA’s army of data scientists and volunteers sifted through the reams of publicly available datasets to map the SDGs onto the city’s footprint.

Photo by Alexis Balinoff on Unsplash.