Making inequities visible: a call for participatory food system dashboards for SDG monitoring

Introduction Cities are at the forefront of addressing interconnected challenges of food insecurity, nutrition inequities, and food system sustainability. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for robust, science-based indicators to monitor progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet municipal governments often lack tailored tools to track food system performance at the level of disaggregation required to address equity gaps. Methods This paper documents the development of, and insights from, two prototype food equity dashboards developed in New York State: the Food Environment Equity Dashboard NYC (FEED-NYC) and the East End of Long Island Food Equity Dashboard. Using a mixed-methods, practice-based design, we integrated traditional administrative datasets with novel data sources, including web-scraped grocery prices, consumer sentiment from online store reviews, anonymized mobility data, app-based food pantry reservation data, and community narratives gathered through surveys and interviews with service organizations. Indicators were selected and refined through a participatory co-design process involving community organizations, service providers, and government stakeholders, and were implemented as interactive visualizations. Results The dashboards highlight key insights into disparities in food access and security, including varying school meal participation across schools with comparable student poverty levels, gaps between estimated SNAP eligibility and enrollment across community districts, spatial and temporal gaps in emergency food access, and substantial neighborhood-level variation in grocery prices for basic food items. Community narratives indicated levels of unmet need higher than those represented in publicly available statistics. Retrospective mapping of the indicators to the SDG framework showed alignment with SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, and 17, and identified dimensions of local food equity that the current indicator framework does not fully capture. Discussion The dashboards demonstrate how municipal food systems monitoring can advance beyond static metrics to incorporate community knowledge, provide interactive exploration capabilities, and expand opportunities for evidence-based policymaking. Our findings suggest that cities are well-positioned to lead both in monitoring progress and advancing UN SDGs through the visualization of food system metrics that prioritize equity, community engagement, and systemic understanding of food access.