China established an International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Beijing on Monday.

It is the world's first international scientific research institution using big data to facilitate the implementation of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – a blueprint adopted by all UN member states in 2015 with 17 SDGs and 169 targets at the core for peace and prosperity.

The center will establish a global monitoring and evaluation system for SDGs, providing relevant UN agencies and member states with data sharing, technological assistance and decision-making support.

Big Earth data, a type of big data associated with the Earth sciences, plays a role in SDGs research.

"Big Earth data can further improve the coverage of monitoring indicators by producing new datasets, and provide more timely data to fill and reconstruct the gaps in time series, based on which, monitoring results of SDG indicators with higher spatial and temporal resolution can be obtained," said Guo Huadong, director of the center and member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Guo said the big Earth data widely used in SDGs research nowadays mainly includes satellite remote sensing data, sensor network data, trajectory data, social and economic statistics data, opinion and behavior data, transaction data and survey data.

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