Claire Bechar, a UTC grad­u­ate who majored in Urban Sys­tems Engi­neer­ing (GSU), won sec­ond place in the Dataviz SDG* com­pe­ti­tion organ­ised by the French min­istry in charge of Eco­log­i­cal Tran­si­tion and Sol­i­dar­i­ty. It is an event that rewards the best dig­i­tal projects that set out the 17 Unit­ed Nations goals for sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, to which end France is an active party. 

Claire Behar, cur­rent­ly in charge of the devel­op­ment for a Data Ana­lyt­ics depart­ment of Work­IT Soft­ware, is a spe­cial­ist in big data appli­ca­tions in e‑commerce, but has also been inter­est­ed in the the­mat­ics of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment ever since she stud­ied at UTC-Com­pieg­ne. In 2012, she also won a sec­ond place — with two oth­er UTC under­grad­u­ates — at the ADEME com­pe­ti­tion: “The SD Gen­er­a­tion”. This is an annu­al event that address­es under­grad­u­ates in high­er edu­ca­tion, who come up with con­crete applic­a­ble solu­tions to day-to-day prob­lems aimed at reduced con­sump­tion of resources and decreased green­house gas (GHG) emis­sion levels. 

What these stu­dents pro­pose to the ADEME Jury was an, “app” to facil­i­tate choice of per­son­al rout­ing when sev­er­al trans­port modes co-exist. The “app” auto­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lates the route and mode that emits least CO2 and pro­pos­es group book­ing. The over­all aim was to set up a gen­er­al pub­lic web-site to facil­i­tate pub­lic trans­port and co-shar­ing rides. Our then under­grad­u­ate was inoc­u­lat­ed with a com­bined ecology/new tech­nol­o­gy virus, enabling her to face new challenges. 

The ‘state’ of the planet Earth

In 2017, and thanks to the eSteem social net­work that favours and enhances human­i­tar­i­an char­i­ty based activ­i­ties and aims, Claire dis­cov­ered the “Dataviz SDG com­pe­ti­tion” (in French Dataviz ODD). She also met her two future team-mates on this asso­cia­tive and pro­fes­sion­al alter­na­tive net­work, both employed by the French Elec­tric­i­ty Oper­a­tor, now called Engie, who were as impas­sioned as Claire was about sus­tain­able devel­op­ment object­ed. When Claire took up this chal­lenge, she had already hear about the UN Hori­zon 2030 glob­al action plan and its 17 Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals (SDG).

How­ev­er, at the time she ignored quite a lot of the point­ers used to set up this “volon­taris­tic” pro­gram. The 17 goals set out in the UN doc­u­ment rely on sta­tis­tics and diag­nos­tics from all round the world. Now it is no easy mat­ter to draw inter­na­tion­al com­par­isons when there are many themes involved. Depend­ing on the coun­tries assessed, the cri­te­ria used cane defined in large­ly dif­fer­ent ways hence the dif­fi­cul­ty of offer­ing a coher­ent overview. Dataviz SDG has the objec­tive to make the infor­ma­tion for this com­plex set-up acces­si­ble and to bet­ter sit­u­ate France’s con­tri­bu­tions and actions. The aim was to make 244 data inputs attrac­tive and eas­i­ly under­stood, using ani­mat­ed images and graph­ics, for domains as dis­tinct as agri­cul­ture, pover­ty lev­els and ter­res­tri­al biodiversity. 

“The indi­ca­tors for social sta­tus are rel­a­tive­ly famil­iar, but in con­tradis­tinc­tion, when we look at “arti­fi­cial­i­sa­tion” of soils or bio­di­ver­si­ty we must know how to be ped­a­gog­i­cal”, analy­ses Claire Behar. Despite the scale of the task, and with just two months to final­ize a pro­pos­al “At UTC, we learned how to imple­ment projects in very short time spans and that was very help­ful here”. 

Her pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ence in the devel­op­ment of “apps” and also that as a user helped her also to acquire a good overview and to pri­or­i­tize prob­lems. Putting the work togeth­er was a remote set up using col­lab­o­ra­tive tools. “All three of us were pro­fes­sion­al­ly very busy, liv­ing in dif­fer­ent towns in the Ile-de-France Region but this also turned out to be a high­ly eco­log­i­cal way to work togeth­er”, adds Claire to sum up. The end-result was a very attrac­tive inter­ac­tive web­site where the objec­tives of SD can be addressed from 4 dif­fer­ent angles: gen­er­al­i­ties, com­par­i­son of French ter­ri­to­r­i­al depart­ments, par­al­lel com­par­isons coun­try-by-coun­try and final­ly an assess­ment of any per­son­al project in terms of the UN’s 17 SDGs.