Semantic modeling of climate change impacts on the implementation of the U.N. sustainable development goals related to poverty, hunger, water, and energy

Extreme climate events disrupt the stable, established interactions among the components of the socio-economic and environmental systems. The disruptions affect reaching the targets defined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, 6, and 7 that aim at ending poverty and hunger and ensuring access to clean water, sanitation, and affordable energy. We have semantically modeled the interactions of climate change events with the components of the food, water, and energy systems in the ‘Sustainable Development and Climate’ (SDC) ontology. The domain ontology formalizes the impacts of the events on the implementations of the actions, plans, strategies, and policies that are described by the targets of the selected goals. To ensure interoperability with other ontologies, our ontology extends classes and properties of the top-level Basic Formal Ontology, mid-level Common Core Ontologies, and other upper-level ontologies. The publicly-available SDC ontology facilitates automated discovery, management, integration, and reasoning of the indicator data of the selected goals by reusing the extensive resources of the Common Core Ontologies for data and information modeling. The SDC knowledge model allows government agencies to identify the consequences of their planned actions on people, resources, and the environment in their country, and assess the impacts of the current climate change on the successful implementation of the requirements for goals 1, 2, 6, and 7.