Geospatial Foundation Models to Enable Progress on Sustainable Development Goals
This work addresses the need for interdisciplinary evaluation of AI models to support global sustainability efforts, though it is incremental in benchmarking existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of assessing the real-world utility of geospatial foundation models for sustainability goals by introducing SustainFM, a benchmarking framework across 17 Sustainable Development Goals, finding that these models often outperform traditional approaches in diverse tasks.
Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) systems that have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, and are now advancing geospatial analysis and Earth Observation (EO). They promise improved generalization across tasks, scalability, and efficient adaptation with minimal labeled data. However, despite the rapid proliferation of geospatial FMs, their real-world utility and alignment with global sustainability goals remain underexplored. We introduce SustainFM, a comprehensive benchmarking framework grounded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with extremely diverse tasks ranging from asset wealth prediction to environmental hazard detection. This study provides a rigorous, interdisciplinary assessment of geospatial FMs and offers critical insights into their role in attaining sustainability goals. Our findings show: (1) While not universally superior, FMs often outperform traditional approaches across diverse tasks and datasets. (2) Evaluating FMs should go beyond accuracy to include transferability, generalization, and energy efficiency as key criteria for their responsible use. (3) FMs enable scalable, SDG-grounded solutions, offering broad utility for tackling complex sustainability challenges. Critically, we advocate for a paradigm shift from model-centric development to impact-driven deployment, and emphasize metrics such as energy efficiency, robustness to domain shifts, and ethical considerations.