Sustainable Development: The Role of GIS and Visualisation

Abstract

The physical environment in which we live and on which our continuing existence depends has limited capacity, therefore people should not consider it as a resource to be exploited for short-term maximised profits. If we are to enjoy a safe and a successful life on the planet Earth then we must use the limited resources at our disposal wisely by being good stewards of our own environment. Our environment has been dominated by our actions and the need to better manage it has been debated widely and vigorously in recent years. In many developing countries, including the insular island nations of the Pacific, economic development and environmental conservation are often in conflict. Conservation is often viewed by economists and some politicians as a constraint to a nation's economic development aspirations. This paper argues that decision makers, especially in traditional societies ignore expert advice provided by Geographic or Spatial Information System (GIS, or SIS). The capability of GIS has been extended to include modelling and visualisation of terrain features in order that decision makers will be able not only to see the current state of the resources that they managed but also see the impacts of their decisions and the future state of those resources. The paper examines the impact of economic development activities on the coastal ecosystems in exemplar developing countries, in the Pacific, and proposes GIS-Visualisation strategies for moving beyond subsistence and economic development aspirations to socially, economically and environmentally sustainable development activities.

Terminology Entries (Alphabetical Presentation)

“…Advances in scienti fi c visualization are changing the role of maps and other graphics as tools of scienti fi c investigation (Latu, 2009).…”

Patterns of Spatial Modeling of The Economy; Human Capital and Poverty in 60 Regions in Southern Sumatera

“…Most existing systems use GIS analytics to find suitable locations for different types of development. At a minimum, research on economic impact analysis, space policy design, identification of potential cluster areas, identification of important social relationships, and web-based GIS [13]. Indeed, the examples of economic impacts in the realm presented by GIS show a close link between meeting human needs and degrading the quality of the environment.…”

Automatic processing of Sentinel-2 image for Kerch peninsula lake areas extraction using QGIS and Python

“…Mapping natural resources, like water objects, is becoming very important due to development of remote sensing products and technologies [1,2].…”