Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Wars and armed conflicts have had profound impacts on local and global sustainable development in an interconnected world. However, evidence on the impacts of wars is fragmented and little attention has been paid to the impacts on the 17 UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a unifying framework for achieving global sustainable development. This perspective synthesizes the scattered information to provide a holistic analysis and highlight the applications of remote sensing in assessing the impacts of wars on global sustainable development in a metacoupling world. Wars have complex impacts on all 17 SDGs, which cascade beyond conflict zones and spillover to adjacent and distant countries worldwide. Satellite remote sensing can play a significant role in monitoring environmental and socioeconomic impacts such as crop production, deforestation, pollution, urban damage, and migration. Remote sensing can provide timely, spatiotemporal, large-scale data for sustainable development impact assessment of conflict zones with restricted access. As 2023 is the middle point of the time period (2015-2030) for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is urgent to conduct more quantitative assessments for wars around the world such as the Russia-Ukraine war. Enhancing remote sensing applications in war-related impact assessment with advanced models and frameworks is very helpful and significant. It is also critical to rethink about global governance by incorporating the ripple effects of wars for policy adjustments to achieve SDGs by 2030.
Jiang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.