Abstract

Evaluating and monitoring the sustainable development of nations and cities requires sets of indicators. Such indicator sets should measure equity, health, environmental, or governmental progress or recess - among other sustainability aspects. In 2015 the United Nations ratified 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) assessed through 231 indicators. However, other - local - sets of indicators have been developed too. In this paper we review geodata challenges that emerged when we developed four sustainability indicator sets in Chile. Faced challenges include (geo)data availability and data representativeness, among others. We analyse how GIScience knowledge has contributed to indicator development and outline three priority research topics: (i) updating indicators based on automated processes, while respecting representativeness, (ii) tools for planning scenario generation, and (iii) methods for short- and long-term forecasting.