Publication

Abstract : Agenda 2030, the imperative to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has intensified globally. However, several factors hinder a nation's progress toward achieving SDGs - an absence of a bottom-up approach that incorporates micro-level SDG targets and indicator localizations, insufficient multi-stakeholder engagement mechanisms, and a lack of a dynamic framework for recommending policies to enhance sustainability. In developing economies such as India, bottom-up empowerment approaches are crucial but face barriers like unavailability of local data, lack of stakeholder participation, inability of crowdsourcing, and lack of appropriate geospatial frameworks. Through this study, a geo-enabled crowd-sourced framework is developed to ensure micro level sustainable development. This unique framework is named SREE - Sustainability and Resilience for community Engagement and Empowerment. SREE integrates multi-stakeholder-based multidisciplinary indicator development, dynamic and granular crowd-sourced data collection mechanisms (mapping, measuring, and monitoring), sustainability assessments through index aggregation, and AI recommender systems. The insights from indicator responses and composite sustainability indices are analysed to formulate stakeholder-specific intervention recommendations. This paper highlights the current challenges of community Sustainability and Resilience (SR) that justify the need for such a framework. The study presents SREE, detailing the system's integrated functionalities. The implementation of SREE in ten Indian communities and its outcomes have been highlighted in the study. The outcomes validated the capabilities of SREE, making it proficient in enhancing micro-level community SR.