ASM
Re-Visioning Spatial Data and Knowledge for Sustainable Development
NIDHI NAGABHATLA and PRASAD THENKABAIL
Nidhi Nagabhatla and Prasad Thenkabail are with the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka,. The adddress for correspondence is NIDHI NAGABHATLA
Sustainable development principles are now an accepted part of the planning process. The use of spatial data technologies to enable and ease those processes is commonplace. But we propose that this means changing the fundamental output of a spatial information system from maps, to digital forms that can be manipulated, analysed, modelled, and assimilated by other systems to solve real world problems.
The need for re-visioning spatial data and knowledge in the decision making process is crucial for keeping a watch on Planet Earth. The vagaries of climate change and environmental degradation demand no less.
The importance of integrated approaches for development and management of natural resources have been emphasised in many fora on sustainable development, including Agenda 21 of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.
Nonetheless it has not been brought into practice to a measurable extent. Most sustainable development decisions are intrinsically multi-disciplinary. They require trade-offs between contradictory goals in different sectors of society. But in practice, most natural resource development research assignments are oriented to a single-sector. Geoscience, encompassing remote sensing, GIS, satellite positioning and data analysis, is powerful because its subject matter is inherently multi-disciplinary. Scenario modelling, decision support systems and knowledge gateways provide incredibly powerful tools for storage and analysis of multi-sectoral data. But they get their power only because they incorporate thematic information from different sectors in a common platform.
This surely has resulted in a vital system to analyse trade-off scenarios at all scales and resolutions.
Recent advances in the geosciences and the new paradigm of data policies has brought the power of high-quality advanced spatial data access to institutes and individuals to solve real world problems. This paradigm shift has resulted in empowering institutions such as the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) to create its own specialised spatial data gateways (http://www.iwmidsp.org) that provide harmonised spatial data for it's niche areas of water and land resource management and assessment.
We discuss two knowledge gateways that illustrate this.
First, the production of the Global Irrigated Area Map and the global map of rainfed cropland areas, both at www.iwmigiam.org, are crucial for studies related to global food security and water use.
These gateways promote independent and consistent products for the world, avoiding inconsistencies of census based statistics. Second, Global Wetland Inventory and Mapping (www.iwmi.cgiar.org/wetlands/), is an attempt to build a network of researcher collaborations and form a distributed network in the framework of agreements such as the Ramsar Convention (www.ramsar.org).
This asks questions such as: is it built on a geospatial platform to evaluate the utility of mapping activities at various scales? Does mapping at a particular scale provide operationally functional management information? In other words, can it identify key issues and change drivers, mitigation options or risk analysis? Is it useful for modeling conservation and development pathways?
The idea is to conceptualise and model global scenarios using a wide array of spatial data that consider temporal variability (centennial, decadal, annual or diurnal), spatial scales, and a host of other issues.
Geospatial tools that present the objective result of modern earth observation systems can significantly contribute toward policy recommendations that aid sustainability. It presents tools to access and process information from a variety of sources and display it in a spatial and visual medium.
Recent advances in spatial data have opened a new paradigm data harmonisation, analysis, modeling, and access. These advances has made it possible for generating global public good spatial data gateways and for generating invaluable products or knowledge gateways, such as GIAM and GWIM.
