On October 27, the 2025 World Science and Technology and Development Forum, hosted by the Chinese Science and Technology Association, opened in Beijing. At this forum, three days of in-depth exchanges and discussions were held around artificial intelligence and future industries, open science and global cooperation, scientists, entrepreneurs and others from around the world.

At the opening ceremony of the forum, a report entitled ¡°Global Scale Sustainable Development Scientific Monitoring Report 2025 ¨C A Decade of Progress from the Global Big Data Perspective¡± was officially released globally. The report, led by the International Center for Sustainable Development Big Data (SDG), brings together the expertise of 21 countries, more than 40 research institutions and international organizations around the world, through several rounds of international and domestic experts review, based on global scale high-time space data products, using innovative scientific approaches, a multi-dimensional ¡°scientific examination¡± of the decade of progress in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals since 2015.

Global sustainable development is urgent and coordinated governance is urgent

This earth's "physical examination report" reveals the grim reality facing global sustainable development: since 2015, the overall process of global sustainable development has far fallen short of expectations, and the situation is very urgent. Among the 18 indicators monitored, only SDG6.6.1 "wetland area" is in a phased (2015-2022) state of "no net loss" globally.

In sharp contrast, as many as 11 indicators face "significant challenges" or "significant challenges." Among them, 8 indicators showed a clear downward trend. These areas of decline extensively involve the foundation of food security (reduction in arable land per capita), water sustainability (reduction in groundwater reserves), marine ecological health (reduction in dissolved oxygen concentration), terrestrial biodiversity (reduction in forest cover), and climate change response (per capita increase in anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions). Core aspects of human survival and development show that systemic risks to global sustainable development are accumulating, and countries urgently need to strengthen their actions.

The report also found that despite higher overall status scores in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and other regions, it also faces a number of indicators of decline, such as higher and increasing per capita carbon dioxide emissions in Australia and New Zealand, as well as marine acidification, decreased forest coverage and land degradation in Europe.

Empowering decision-making: Three major directions to accelerate the global sustainable development goals

At the national level, the report through 15 indicators with national independent contribution characteristics for comprehensive calculation, China, Canada, Brazil, Norway and other countries, thanks to active actions in the fields of ecological protection, sustainable use of resources, became the world's leading "positive contributor". of which China's 15 indicators average contribution of 5.84%, ranked first in the world, reflecting international responsibility and responsibility in the process of promoting the global relevant sustainable development goals.

In view of the current challenges faced by global sustainable development, the report puts forward three suggestions: First, relying on platforms such as the Technology Promotion Mechanism (TFM) and the International Science Program for Digital Sustainable Development (DSP) to speed up the filling of data gaps and improve the integrity and timeliness of assessment data; The second is to deepen the correlation analysis of "food-water-energy" to maximize the synergy effect and avoid the waste of resources caused by the promotion of a single goal; Third, based on the evaluation results of spatial differentiation, optimize policy and fund allocation, improve the inclusive and fair governance system, and narrow the regional development gap.

Reporting Innovation Integrating Big Data on Earth Building a New Paradigm for Assessing Sustainable Development Goals

Currently, the United Nations global assessment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development mainly relies on country statistics voluntarily submitted by Member States. Although this mechanism plays a key role in policy coordination, in actual operation, due to problems such as unbalanced statistical capabilities of various countries, different data standards and calibers, long reporting cycles and missing some data, it is difficult to achieve consistent global coverage, continuous and comparable high-precision monitoring in time and space limits the ability to conduct rapid and objective judgments from a global perspective.

In order to break through the inherent limitations of the above-mentioned traditional data, the report systematically integrates multi-source earth big data such as satellite remote sensing, ground sensing networks, and social statistical surveys, and establishes an independent and standardized scientific monitoring system for 18 sustainable development indicators with high spatial heterogeneity.

At the same time, at the opening ceremony of the 2025 World Forum on Science and Technology and Development, several scientific organizations also released the IUPAC Global 10 emerging technologies in the field of chemistry in 2025, "AI technology application research in the field of hydrogen", "smart manufacturing case template" and "smart manufacturing new technology application guidelines" group standards, and open knowledge and data sharing platform open for science.

(CCTV reporter Zhang Chunling)