FAQ

Anyone with an interest in sustainable development and world geography can use this site! 

However, this project was specifically developed to be used in classrooms and other learning environments in Canada for youth ages 12 to 18.

This project was conceived and developed by Aga Khan Foundation Canada in partnership with Canadian Geographic. The Government of Canada provided financial support.

In 2015, 193 United Nations Member States made a historic promise to secure the rights and well-being of everyone on a healthy, thriving planet, when they adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs, sometimes referred to as the Global Goals, are a call for action by all countries – developed and developing – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection. 

Learn more about the SDGs.

A Sustainable World is an independent project exploring the SDGs. It has not been approved by the United Nations and does not reflect the views of the United Nations or its officials or Member States.

In addition to introducing youth to sustainable development concepts, this tool is intended to help students develop cartographic literacy. We opted to only display data related to one theme at a time to keep the map uncluttered and make it easier to understand. 

Keeping data layers to a minimum also reduces the bandwidth requirements and loading time for the map!

Information about the data can be found in the “About the Data” section on the “About” page of the website.

Aga Khan Foundation Canada and Canadian Geographic share a commitment to public engagement, including a specific focus on supporting educators and youth across Canada. 

This project was conceived by AKFC as part of its organizational mandate to support global citizenship education. This mandate is made possible in part by the Government of Canada, specifically through the International Development Education and Awareness (IDEA) program which provided financing for this project.

A choropleth is a type of map commonly used for data visualization. It uses shading or colours to distinguish different data values on a mapped area, to visualize spatial distributions and patterns. 

All four themes of A Sustainable World include a choropleth. For example, in the education theme, the darker a country is shaded orange, the higher the percentage of students who are out of school. 

A Sustainable World uses base maps from Mapbox. The projections used are the standard globe for the 3D view and Winkel Tripel for the 2D view. The boundaries and names used do not imply endorsement of any territorial claim.

AI was used to support the development of certain elements of this website, for example quality control and bug fixes for the interactive map. Some text was simplified or edited with the help of AI.

No photographs or video footage on this site were generated or meaningfully altered by AI.

All AI outputs were reviewed and approved by a human before implementation.