Deep Learning Analysis of Satellite Images for UN SDG Monitoring in Mauritius’ Black River District

This paper proposes an integrated strategy to analyse the progress of selected United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 1, 2, and 13) using Earth Observation (EO) data and deep learning (DL) based classification. The research focuses on Mauritius’s Black River district, which is facing growing urbanization, agricultural land demand, forest conservation needs, and land degradation. These challenges are closely related to the reduction of poverty (SDG 1) through settlement monitoring, food security (SDG 2) through green farmland analysis, and climate action (SDG 13) through forest cover and bare land tracking. High-resolution satellite images from the Satellogic constellation were pre-processed, classified, and mapped to the SDGs’ key land cover categories. A convolutional neural network (CNN) model was trained to distinguish city structures, agriculture farmland, forest land, and barren land, with up to 99% overall precision. DL-based image analysis has the ability to monitor the UN SDGs in specific regions and provide actionable information for the sustainable development plans of small island governments.