Geospatial Foundation Models to Enable Progress on Sustainable Development Goals

TL;DR

This paper introduces SustainFM, a benchmarking framework for geospatial foundation models aligned with Sustainable Development Goals, assessing their performance, transferability, and energy efficiency across diverse Earth Observation tasks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive evaluation of geospatial foundation models in sustainability contexts, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and the need for impact-driven deployment metrics.

Findings

FMs often outperform traditional methods on diverse geospatial tasks.

Evaluation should include transferability, generalization, and energy efficiency.

FMs enable scalable solutions for complex sustainability challenges.

Abstract

Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) systems that have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, and are now advancing geospatial analysis and Earth Observation (EO). They promise improved generalization across tasks, scalability, and efficient adaptation with minimal labeled data. However, despite the rapid proliferation of geospatial FMs, their real-world utility and alignment with global sustainability goals remain underexplored. We introduce SustainFM, a comprehensive benchmarking framework grounded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with extremely diverse tasks ranging from asset wealth prediction to environmental hazard detection. This study provides a rigorous, interdisciplinary assessment of geospatial FMs and offers critical insights into their role in attaining sustainability goals. Our findings show: (1) While not universally superior, FMs often outperform traditional approaches across diverse tasks and datasets. (2) Evaluating FMs should go beyond accuracy to include transferability, generalization, and energy efficiency as key criteria for their responsible use. (3) FMs enable scalable, SDG-grounded solutions, offering broad utility for tackling complex sustainability challenges. Critically, we advocate for a paradigm shift from model-centric development to impact-driven deployment, and emphasize metrics such as energy efficiency, robustness to domain shifts, and ethical considerations.