# A Novel ICT Framework for Sustainable Development Goals
## 5 The ICT Framework Description
### Sustainability Module  
This module aims:  
* To implement sustainable development goals/targets at the level of municipality/city and to provide upscaling of local SGGs initiatives and actions;
* To mobilize citizens to promote practical solutions for sustainable development;
* To provide a platform for ensuring stakeholders' engagement, partnerships, communication and outreach, and for offering knowledge management;
* To illustrate how and in what ways a municipality/city can integrate the goals/targets in its strategies, policies and practices;
* To ensure ranking of locally transformed goals/targets introducing primary, secondary, and so on goals/targets;
* To provide guidance on scientific assessments of the locally implemented goals/targets, to distinguish various paths for mitigating potential trade-offs, and to maximize synergies between the social, economic and environmental objectives;
* To provide ranking of social-ecological systems within the municipality/city;
* To provide scientific evidence and theoretical foundation for computing integrated (composited) indicators; and
* To ensure that sustainable development should be considered in a more general framework as a normative value system by addressing \"three moral imperatives: satisfying human needs, ensuring social equity, and respecting environmental limits\" [57]. Integrated assessment modeling is a tool used by various stakeholders for prediction and forecasting, for enhancing the productiveness and fruitfulness of decision-making and management, and for improving social learning as well as system understanding. Models holistically integrate biophysical, social and economic processes, their interactions and responses to changes. [PERSON] et al. [183] review five common approaches for integrating knowledge by considering various modeling approaches ranging from differential equations to statistical modeling. Social learning refers \"to the capacity of a social network to communicate, learn from past behavior, and perform collective action, e.g., dealing with complex technical tasks and at the same time the social relational activities\" [183], see also [184; 185]. Social-ecological systems framework (SESF), developed by [PERSON] and her colleagues, has been evolved incrementally over decades by considering a large number of empirical cases [111]. [PERSON] and her colleagues collected concepts and variables across cases. Different logical categories are termed \"tiers\" organized hierarchically so that lower-level tiers account for subdivisions within elements of the next higher tier. The first-tier variables include: Social, economic, and political settings (S), Resource systems (RS), Governance systems (GS), Resource units (RU), Actors (A), Interactions (I), Outcomes (O), and Related ecosystems (ECO). Further development and application of the SES framework hasdiscussed the formal relationships between concepts and variables of the framework [111]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [110] suggested a three-step process for an application of the SES framework to particular cases. In the first step, a level of analysis has to be selected by considering interactions and outcomes related to a particular resource system and related resource units, actors involved, and governance systems that impact the actors' behavior. In the second step, variables to be measured and indicators to be implemented are selected. Finally, the last step enhances the effectiveness of communicating and conveying outcomes and results across research communities. Variables/attributes, identified for studying SESs, are organized in a nested multi-layer or multi-tier structure. Each of the eight broad subsystems can be analyzed into their component and further analyzed into their multiple conceptual tiers (layers). SESF helps to understand different types of actions, activities and processes undertaken by actors and the interaction of these actions with other variables in determining social-ecological outcomes and dynamics of SESF.