The intertwining of world news with Sustainable Development Goals: An effective monitoring tool

This study aims to bring about a novel approach to the analysis of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) based solely on the appearance of news. Our purpose is to provide a monitoring tool that enables world news to be detected in an SDG-oriented manner, by considering multilingual as well as wide geographic coverage. The association of the goals with news basis the World Bank Group Topical Taxonomy, from which the selection of search words approximates the 17 development goals. News is extracted from The GDELT Project (Global Database of Events, Language and Tone) which gathers both printed as well as online news from around the world. 60 851 572 relevant news stories were identified in 2019. The intertwining of world news with SDGs as well as connections between countries are interpreted and highlight that even in the most SDG-sensitive countries, only 2.5% of the news can be attributed to the goals. Most of the news about sustainability appears in Africa as well as East and Southeast Asia, moreover typically the most negative tone of news can be observed in Africa. In the case of climate change (SDG 13), the United States plays a key role in both the share of news and the negative tone. Using the tools of network science, it can be verified that SDGs can be characterized on the basis of world news. This news-centred network analysis of SDGs identifies global partnerships as well as national stages of implementation towards a sustainable socio-environmental ecosystem. In the field of sustainability, it is vital to form the attitudes and environmental awareness of people, which strategic plans cannot address but can be measured well through the news.