Using Natural Language Processing for Automating the Identification of Climate Action Interlinkages within the Sustainable Development Goals
Xin Zhou (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)), Kshitij Jain (Google Inc.), Mustafa Moinuddin (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)) and Patrick McSharry (Carnegie Mellon University Africa; Oxford Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, Oxford University)
Abstract
Climate action, Goal 13 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), cuts across almost all SDGs. Achieving climate goals can reinforce the achievements in many other goals, but at the same time climate mitigation and adaptation measures may generate trade-offs, such as levelling the cost of energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels. Leveraging the synergies and minimizing the trade-offs among the climate goals and other SDGs is an imperative task for ensuring policy coherence. Understanding the interlinkages between climate action and other SDGs can help inform about the synergies and trade-offs. This paper presents a novel methodology by using natural language processing (NLP) to automate the process of systematically identifying the key interlinkages between climate action and SDGs from a large amount of climate literature. A qualitative SDG interlinkages model for climate action was automatically generated and visualized in a network graph. This work contributes to the conference thematic topic on using AI for policy alignment for climate change goals, SDGs and associated environmental, social and governance (ESG) frameworks.