Network Science for the Sustainable Development Goals

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, constitute a roadmap of the broad set of challenges that our society is facing today - from ending poverty, hunger and gender inequalities, to ensuring quality education and tackling sustainability issues. Network science offers a powerful approach to understanding these interconnected goals by mapping and analyzing complex relationships across SDG targets, examining synergies, and uncovering patterns that inform strategic action. Network science can reveal structural inequities, accelerate impact analysis, and provide insights essential for sustainable development.

Over the past years NGOs, UN agencies, governments, and practitioners have become increasingly interested in applying techniques from network science to address these complex problems. Still, the gap between the academic world and the organizations that could use the proposed methods and insights for their programmatic purposes remains wide.

This workshop aims to foster discussions on the role of network science in directly contributing to achieving the SDGs, with an emphasis on developing models and frameworks that support data-informed policy decisions. By showcasing relevant theoretical, empirical and operational work, we aim to bridge this gap, promoting actionable insights based on network-based techniques for evidence-based policy-making and sustainable development.

Topics of interest will be (but are not limited to):

• Novel network methods for analyzing SDGs, including understanding influence and relations or identifying and measuring vulnerabilities (poverty, lack of information, exposure to conflict, resilience to natural disasters, epidemic risk, bullying, discrimination, etc.).

• Data availability for SDG monitoring: novel open network data sets and studies on representativeness and bias, algorithmic privacy, transparency and fairness in the context of social good applications.

• Replicability and transferability of models in vulnerable and data-poor contexts; model interpretability in support of better decision making.

• From data to policy making for SDG advancement: operationalized network science research for crafting sustainable solutions that can be globally scaled, that directly inform SDG policy and implementation.

Successful editions of this satellite took place in Vienna in 2023 (https://sites.google.com/view/netsci4sdgs23/) and online in 2020 (https://sites.google.com/view/netsci4sdgs/), preceded in 2019 by the satellite Network Science for Social Good, co-organized by some of the current organizers (https://sites.google.com/view/netsci4sg/home).