DESCRIPTION
The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for sustainable development goals (SDG) calls for actions to achieve a prosperous and inclusive future for all. Since its adoption in 2015, progress varies towards the 17 SDG and appears insufficient to meet some goals by 2030. The COVID-19 pandemic hinders many developments further and even pushes steps away from some targets. This paper is a revision to an editorial published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS) in 2020 with updates on emerging research opportunities to advance Geographical Information Science (GIScience) in response to SDG challenges. The paper reiterates the intellectual relevance of GIScience to the SDG and shortfalls identified by the 2019 UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. Additional discussions respond to issues raised in the recently released UN SDG report 2021 (United Nations 2021). GIScience converges domain knowledge and computational methods to understand complex relationships among economic, social, and environmental systems and innovates spatial concepts to seek integrated solutions. Since sustainable development must consider local, regional, and global ramifications, GIScience contributes to UN SDG by advancing methodologies that fathom and utilize geographic information to cognize complexity and dynamics across multiple scales in space and time.
