Land use changes, including rapid urbanization and deforestation, cause emissions and biodiversity loss worldwide. The world’s wealthiest countries are consuming and polluting the most, while the poorest countries are significantly experiencing the negative effects of climate change induced by humans. Access to basic human rights such as food, water, and education is not uniformly available. These sustainability challenges are deeply intertwined and complex. Maps can help reduce complexity. People are more likely to support interventions and policies they understand. Maps act as a boundary object to gather around and discuss sustainability challenges and solutions. Interactive cartography and geovisualizations reveal insights in a way that makes the viewer feel like they made a discovery independently. This is an opportunity to connect the Policy – Data nexus. The FOSS4G community is the backbone for creating the open-source, accessible tools needed to make the maps necessary to answer spatial sustainability questions.

Currently, for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicator data, United Nations (UN) member states are invited to submit a single value for each of the 234 unique SDG indicators, often excluding the spatial data required for their calculation. There are copious amounts of missing data for the SDG indicators and mismatches between the SDG indicators and the goals themselves. There is a need for more appropriate and localizable SDG indicators, including spatial data collection workflows, to monitor change and identify where localized interventions should be placed. Local priorities and understandings need to be reflected in training data and the verification of the accuracy of the maps. For example, who decides what is a forest? What is a mountain? While mapping globally can help identify where sustainability challenges occur, mapping locally is needed to understand the causes of these challenges and where to place effective interventions. Customizable methodologies are needed for collecting and processing the spatial data associated with the SDG indicators.

Global spatial datasets are available to help monitor progress toward sustainable development. These datasets could monitor localized solutions and be augmented with drone data, 360 images, and local data collection and analysis efforts. There is a growing willingness among citizen scientists, volunteers, and academics to process and produce data through initiatives such as YouthMappers, HOTOSM, Zooniverse, and more. The FOSS4G community is building tools and identifying solutions for effective data infrastructures for sustainable development.

This is a pivotal opportunity to invite the world to participate in mapping, to show what is possible with maps to monitor sustainability, identify localized solutions, and measure the effectiveness of interventions. Here, I share examples of how maps are made with open-source software and how FAIR spatial data can be used as leverage points to promote global sustainability while simultaneously integrating local values and identifying localized solutions.

Together, we can illuminate pathways towards connecting the data needed to create visualizations for policymakers. Timeless cartographic principles for spatial communication without constraints of software defaults, cartography for sustainable development is needed to inform policy decisions, foster public understanding, and provide insights for a sustainable world.