Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are centrally connected to sustainability issues. They are integrator’s of spatial information which originates from technologies and systems used to monitor, measure, map and model environments and systems related to sustainability issues.

Sustainability issues are increasingly in the public awareness today. This means that they are also higher on the business and political agenda. The trend is toward defining sustainable systems more closely within a framework of sustainable development, business processes and returns on investment – not just in terms of financial investment, but also the social impacts and health of the environments around us. We can call this sustainable living and we need to be active participants, not passive nomads.

Can you imagine trying to pull all the inter-connected pieces of information about our roads, land use, population demographics, rivers, buildings and oceans and so on into a few books or spreadsheets? It would be impossible, and this is before we even begin to analyse all that information and start the planning and communication processes necessary for investment and building toward the future.

GIS are particularly useful for integrating data about all of these features, and comparing them to help us understand what is around us. But that is not enough. A GIS cannot develop the strategy or plan on where we need to go sustainability wise, and they certainly cannot decide who must do what to make the hard decisions necessary to set us on the correct course. These decisions will become easier with higher quality and more accurate information.

The connection of GIS to sustainability today is of strategic value. Human beings are central to any sustainability strategy. People need more information about structures, environments and the situation around them – so they can make better decisions. It is not prudent to make sustainability decisions on business calculations alone. There is a growing need to understand why we are making particular decisions.

Correspondingly, we need to measure and monitor our neighbourhoods and land use better. We need more continuous and accurate estimates about the condition of infrastructure. And we need to understand how budgets connect to sustainable infrastructure and quality of life, more closely.

We know how to build roads, we know how to farm land, we know how to fish the oceans and we know how many buses its takes to move people. But how many bus departments know what the fish or agriculture department is doing? Does the railway stop at the local administrative boundary – and its funding too? If we need coal energy, how does it impact regional groundwater? Are the forest fires here this year, due to lack of snow 300 kilometers away? If there is no snow, how does that impact tourism anyhow – what are the repercussions of that? What is all this talk about climate change and how does it really translate into the numbers of roads and cars we are trying to support, and would greater investment in high-speed transit make more sense?

What is our responsibility for non-sustainable development in distant lands? Are we like ostrich and burying our heads, or are we adhering to similar practices in a global sense?

When we begin to look at and address issues in these kinds of ways, then we can leverage GIS to help in our understanding, management and decision making processes – more effectively – toward sustainability in a strategic way. These are tough questions. We need the best tools to help us.

I want to end this with one point which has been on my mind a long time. I firmly believe that if we get the infrastructure part right, meaning that we invest in a core set of needed infrastructure, then we will be solving a large part of the environmental and sustainability issues.  In other words, investment and development will equate to solution - if done right. GIS will be part of defining that core.

In a previous Perspectives post Jeff and I tackled the question, “How are spatial tools integrated into the process of sustainable development?” This week’s question singles out GIS and its connection with sustainability. While earlier we were talking about the spatial tools suite, it’s a necessary exercise to single out GIS because of its integrative power.

GIS has a huge role to play in the stewardship of our planet. GIS projects have already contributed a great deal toward understanding and quantifying what is meant by sustainability, and will continue to contribute to our understanding of Earth systems interaction. But to date there hasn’t been much geospatial community or GIS vendor action to create multidisciplinary workflows or toolsets that specifically address sustainability.

Quantifying Sustainability

Sustainable development is at the confluence of economic vitality, healthy communities and sustaining the environment. Sustainable development also must relate to meeting present needs with a great deal of forethought to future needs. There are a lot of metrics to follow and quantify at all scales of sustainable development, and there’s a need to integrate information from disparate systems and sensors in order to understand the large picture. A robust data handling and visual communication system is the most efficient means to arrive at a consensus, and this is where GIS shines.

At the building level there is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard for what constitutes a green building from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). It’s a nationally accepted benchmark of standards for the design, construction and operation of highly efficient green buildings. The metrics for LEED are easily quantifiable and are being incorporated into Building Information Modeling tools so that designers gain instant feedback on the efficiency of their designs before anything is constructed.

There are also LEED metrics for what constitutes a sustainable site, with guidelines on site selection and connection to community. Such elements as community connectivity, brownfield redevelopment and connections to alternative transportation factor into a site’s rating. There are also provisions for pollution prevention during construction, protection and restoration of habitat and maximizing open space. Stormawater design, the heat island effect and light pollution also factor in. The American Society for Landscape Architects is working to expand the USGBC site metrics for its practitioners so that the standards go well beyond sites where buildings are the critical component.

ASLA is looking to apply site-rating tools at a larger scale such as recreation areas, leisure parks, cultural landscapes, ecological restorations, and utility and transportation corridors. There’s a draft tool for rating sites that’s currently under consideration, with time for comment (see the Sustainable Sites Initiative website for details). There’s also a LEED for Neighborhood Development standard that has been released in draft form by USGBC that will create new standards for community-scale projects.

Why not expand these metrics to even larger scales of community, region, ecosystem, watershed, etc.? These standards are an effective way to foster cross-disciplinary consensus on metrics that can be easily measured by software systems. The fostering of standards provides motivation and guidance to achieve the best possible outcomes. The process of developing and maintaining standards instills collaboration by inclusion of multiple stakeholders throughout.

Sustainability Dashboards

The inclusion of benchmarks such as the LEED standards within our systems serves to check and compare our progress against established and measurable metrics. The scoring system lends itself well to establishing system architectures that would allow us to easily gauge our progress on multiple scales.

Autodesk recently showcased a Green Design Dashboard to continually calculate the factors that affect the overall LEED score throughout the building design process. This tool will monitor such things as energy use, water use, storm water runoff, carbon footprint and daylighting on a real-time basis in order to inform designers of the overall impact of their structure as they design it. The underlying BIM modeling tool already

A sustainability dashboard for sites makes good sense, and GIS is the natural tool to fill this space. It wouldn’t take much to incorporate LEED standards for sites into GIS tools for sites. This could be administered at the individual site level or could be incorporated into a city oversight for a collaborative toolset that serves a broader region.

System of Systems Approach

At the larger scale of state/province or country levels a system of systems approach comes into play. Canada has been a thought leader on this from the inception of GIS through to today with the implementation of the National Land and Water Information Service. This Internet-based geospatial service provides online access to water and agri-environmental information to help citizens make responsible land-use decisions.

From its inception, NLWIS took a collaborative approach tat established multiple partnerships with federal players, non-government organizations, industry groups and academic institutions. The GIS technology framework that conforms to national standards and specifications ensures that the service scales effectively to meet its established goals.

Large system of system frameworks can effectively scale the idea of dashboard metrics to much broader areas. NLWIS provides geospatial information and decision-support tools to stakeholders at local and regional scales while improving national data collection standards, analysis capabilities and reporting. By establishing this standardized framework across the country, the system can then be leveraged to support much broader environmental goals in subsequent iterations.

Humans Factor

In a recent blog post I highlighted the ‘Human-Centric’ map that recognizes that we’re the ultimate ecosystem engineers, given that more than 80% of the Earth’s surface has been fundamentally altered by our actions. I find this approach to be a healthy adjustment to prior ecosystem-centric thinking.

It’s time to quantify our actions and our impacts on a global scale. GIS provides the toolsets and framework for organizing multi-disciplinary information at all scales. GIS also provides the collaborative framework for data collection and analysis in order to quantify any remediary actions.

While GIS has made inroads in multiple disciplines that are all concerned with sustainability, the true test and power of the tools will be in combining these various views into a collective and holistic approach at ever-broadening scales.