In October 2017, Los Angeles (LA) Mayor Eric Garcetti made a pledge: The second largest U.S. city would strive to meet the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). LA’s move came amid a wave of commitments to the SDGs, also known as the Global Goals, since they were adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015.

There was only one problem: The 17 SDGs and their 169 targets were designed by countries, for countries. Cities were welcome to pledge their support, but they were not front and center in the carefully crafted and negotiated document known as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in subsequent efforts like the adoption of an indicator framework by the United Nations Statistical Commission.

That conundrum immediately hit home for Erin Bromaghim, LA’s Director of Olympic and Paralympic Development. “Cities had ostensibly committed themselves, but there were not a lot of examples of what that meant,” she said. “The idea was somewhat new without direct connectivity to non-profit or national government support. We didn’t have a template on how we were meant to get started.”

Over the nearly four years since the mayor made that pledge, LA has developed an open-source platform for collecting and analyzing SDG indicators at the local level. As an open-source tool, LA created the template that it lacked when first pursuing this exercise in the hopes of paving the way for other cities to more easily track their progress on the SDGs.

To kickstart the effort, the city had vital support from the philanthropic sector. As part and parcel of the city’s public pledge to the SDGs, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation agreed to backstop the local government as it pioneered just how a municipal government could adapt this national framework for sustainable development to the local level.

LA’s first move was to enlist the help of outside entities that had relevant knowledge and expertise. In February 2018, the city entered into partnership agreements with a political economy institute at LA Occidental College and with the World Council on City Data. These partnerships made LA one of eight hub cities around the world that agree to share data collected in the development of local SDG indicators. The city also sought to develop baseline measurements by conducting an inventory of existing city plans that touch on the various aspects of the SDGs.

“Right away you can see what cities may or may not have within their responsibilities,” Bromaghim said. For example, Los Angeles County, a unit of local government larger than the City of Los Angeles, is responsible for public health. Likewise for education, the Los Angeles Unified School District encompasses a geography larger than the City of Los Angeles.

As a result, LA parsed which targets were more relevant to its municipal jurisdiction.

With regards to SDG3 on health, for example, “While we care a lot about all of the targets and indicators, we don’t have jurisdiction over maternal mortality [Target 3.1] but we do have jurisdiction over traffic fatalities [Target 3.6],” she said. In the case of SDG11.4 on cultural heritage, LA felt that it could go deeper than the national target of dollar amount spent on cultural resources by incorporating a map of citywide cultural resources that was already underway at the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

With other targets, the city was surprised to discover just how much influence it had. When reviewing SDG15 about life on land, Bromaghim initially did not expect the city to have much authority. “I didn’t think of LA as a hub of biodiversity but in fact we have huge teams looking at biodiversity in LA, such as understanding wildlife corridors and invasive species,” she said. “There are amazing pockets of expertise throughout the city structure, all of which relate back to practical city services.” For example, biodiversity indicators helped inform the city’s Bureau of Sanitation to avoid wildlife corridors and build public support for the construction of wildlife corridors over existing roadways. This indicator also created opportunities to engage the public by incorporating data from the citizen science application iNaturalist.

The LA Open SDG data platform went live in July 2019. It currently collects 159 indicators, which is 60 more than the U.S. government’s portal SDG.gov. In 2019, the city also submitted a Voluntary Local Review to the UN High-Level Political Forum. Finally, the city launched an SDG Activity Index as a public encyclopedia of local entities across the public, private, philanthropic, grassroots, and charitable sectors that are pursuing efforts to improve SDG-related outcomes in the city.

This wealth of material has been a beacon for cities looking to do the same but unsure where to start. “Translating and implementing the question of what it takes to move the SDGs forward can be daunting,” said the UN Foundation’s Krista Rasmussen. “LA has laid out a clear path and developed a whole process to accelerate the SDG framework and make it applicable to their city. The meticulous documentation is invaluable.” Rasmussen applauded LA in particular for taking measures beyond those prescribed in the SDG framework.

Rasmussen credited the resources that a big city like LA was able to marshal, from foundation to university support. In addition to Occidental College, other institutes of higher learning like the University of Southern California, Arizona State University, and Pomona College joined the SDG effort and provided a pipeline for students to work on the SDG data collection effort. “They have resources and additional capacity that other cities don’t have,” she said.

As one convener hoping to spread local adoption of the SDGs, Rasmussen said the UN Foundation has directed cities like Arlington, Virginia and Phoenix, Arizona to learn from the LA experience. LA was also one of the featured case studies in a January-February 2021 workshop on Voluntary Local Reviews attended by representatives from 140 local and regional governments.

“Los Angeles is the first city in the world to report SDG data at such a granular level using an open-source platform,” said Elettra Baldi of Open Data Watch. “This is important because it serves as a blueprint for other cities that want to adopt the SDGs locally. They created the portal using GitHub, a free software, and other cities can reuse the code used to build the SDG platform for free. This is a crucial step that LA has taken to ensure that other cities can replicate their portal.”

What at first seemed like a monumental task slowly but surely became more manageable as LA’s army of data scientists and volunteers sifted through the reams of publicly available datasets to map the SDGs onto the city’s footprint.

“From the outside the goals are so big -- think about something like reducing inequalities,” Bromaghim said. “But when I started digging in on how it relates back to LA, it was just a matching game.”