Towards an automated spatial workflow for the global monitoring of public urban green accessibility in the light of the Sustainable Development Goals

The 11th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) by the UN sets the achievement of inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable settlements as a goal by 2030. One of the sub-targets (11.7) within this goal addresses the safe and inclusive accessibility of public spaces considering also vulnerable social groups. This discussion paper reviews UN metadata reports and investigates the advantages of considering a spatial approach for SDG indicator 11.7.1 to be more informative. We argue that there are two crucial characteristics of this geospatial approach for global monitoring and assessment: transferability and automation. As a data source with high potential in global assessment, remote sensing is acknowledged to be useful and widely available but due to the lacking information extractable about ownership (public or private space), additional fieldwork is also necessary, which hinders automation and makes transferability time- and resource-consuming. Based on the review of the SDG goals and recent literature, we therefore propose a new, spatially explicit SDG indicator on urban green access and lay down the foundations of a potential workflow for transferable and automated analysis relying on remote sensing and geo-social media data.