Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2023

The 'Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals' shows the current state of the world when it comes to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the United Nations adopted in 2015. No poverty (SDG 1), zero hunger (SDG 2), but also climate action (SDG 13) and industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9) cover a broad set of goals aimed at creating peace and prosperity on a livable planet.

The Atlas, a project with the World Bank, dedicates one webpage to each of the goals, packed with interactive data visualizations to explore challenges as well as progress when it comes to these goals.

An interesting challenge in this project was setting up the infrastructure. We had a team of authors at the World Bank plus an editor, so a collaborative environment was a must. The underlying infrastructure of the page was written in SvelteKit (the current favorite of all devs involved). To support collaboration and enable automation as much as possible we modified the workflow from the previous Atlas project a bit: we ended up with a Google Docs-based workflow that also uses the ArchieML markup language with some custom additions (i.e., square-brackets commands that would create custom inserts like [chapter: 1] to create a styled link to chapter 1). Authors would write their chapters in this ArchieML-dialect and Github Actions would deploy these changes via node-scripts to a Github page which acted as our staging environment. Various other tasks like internationalization or automated screenshots (every visualization can be downloaded) also required smart infrastructure support.

As for the data visualizations, I was happy to take a lead when it came to design and development on several chapters. The process was geared towards quality, so it's safe to assume that every visualization on the page would go through at least two rounds of designs and prototypical implementations.

Winning two awards at the 2023 Information Is Beautiful Awards - including the overall 'Most Beautiful' - confirmed our process.