Information and Communications Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals: State-of-the-Art, Needs and Perspectives

TL;DR

This paper reviews the role of ICTs in achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, highlighting research gaps and emphasizing the need for holistic social perspectives to enhance ICT contributions by 2030.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of ICTs' roles in SDGs, identifies research gaps, and calls for more holistic approaches beyond technical aspects.

Findings

Most research focuses on technical aspects of ICTs for SDGs.

Significant gaps exist in integrating social and environmental perspectives.

Urgent need for innovative ICT solutions to support SDGs globally.

Abstract

In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly accepted the 2030 Development Agenda, which has included 92 paragraphs, and the Paragraph 91 defined 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets. The goal of this paper is to discover the correlations among SDGs and information and communications technologies (ICTs). This paper discusses the roles and opportunities that ICTs play in pursuing the SDGs. We identify a number of research gaps to those three pillars, social, economic, and environmental perspectives, of sustainable development. After extensive literature reviews on the SDG-related research initiatives and activities, we find that the majority of contributions to SDGs recognized by the IEEE and ACM research communities have mainly focused on the technical aspects, while there are lack of the holistic social good perspectives. Therefore, there are essential and urgent needs to raise the awareness and call for attentions on how to innovate and energize ICTs in order to best assist all nations to achieve the SDGs by 2030.