Development and testing of a concept for AI-supported SDG status assessment for Hamburg

The Hanseatic City of Hamburg is developing a sustainability strategy based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This requires a comprehensive assessment of the city’s existing contributions to the SDGs. To this end, corsus has developed a concept for an AI-supported assessment based on existing sources of information.

On behalf of the Hamburg Sustainability Forum and in close coordination with the Ministry of the Environment, Climate, Energy and Agriculture (BUKEA), corsus, together with subcontractors (Global Goals Directory), has developed a concept for an AI-supported SDG status assessment for Hamburg and tested various approaches with the Ministry of Culture and Media (BKM). The aim was to develop a method that would allow the large number of existing strategic documents and information from the authorities to be automatically captured and evaluated. The workload for the employees of the authorities involved was to be kept as low as possible.

During the development of the concept, the automated collection of strategic documents and the classification of documents in terms of strategic relevance and their contributions to the SDGs were tested and reviewed for feasibility. The approach chosen was to collect and classify the documents available on Hamburg’s transparency portal using natural language processing (NLP).