Area of Focus

Sustainability is the study of how natural systems function, remain diverse and produce everything it needs for the ecology to remain in balance. Sustainable development has been a focus of international public policy since the Earth Summit in 1992. It identifies three core objectives for human development i.e. economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) form the backbone of today's digital economy and have enormous potential to fast forward the progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and improve people's lives. We need to understand that ICT usage can decrease the greenhouse emissions drastically. The real time initiatives like Cloud computing, video conferencing smart livestock management tools that are a part of ICT can reduce carbon and methane emissions. These can only be achieved if participants understand the under- current of sustainable development. The objective is to sensitize the participants from academia, industry, policy makers about how increased use of ICT can revolutionize the future for sustainable development.

The ICT can accelerate the action on the SDGs by achieving following objectives:

  • By assessing the current state of broadband development.
    • Covering approximately 90% of world's population with mobile broadband connectivity by 2021
  • ICT can be a powerful means of implementing changes by introducing five ways such as:
    • Speed and scale of uptake
    • Reduced deployment costs
    • Growth in public awareness
    • Delivery of innovation, connetivity, productivity and efficiency gains across the sectors
    • Rapid upgradation
  • Increment in case studies illustrating the ICT support achieving SDGs.
    • Include breakthroughs in digital electronics, e-governance, healthcare etc.
  • Analyzing the current SDG indicators.
    • Capturing technological transformation and the need for new indicator.
  • Recommending the highlighted sectors to leverage ICT effectively to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
    • Enabling the policy framework, strong public private partnership, and sufficient public and private investment.

This workshop as a whole shall take a look at these issues by keeping in mind the benefits that each category of participant can reap. There is an urgent need for research to identify how decision makers use information and develop packages and applications based on modern technologies and discoveries in the areas of visualization, pattern recognition, and integration of different forms of information. Awareness has to created at a local level which shall bring about changes at a global level as a whole.