Today is Blog Action Day 09, with a focus on Climate Change. More than 7,000 bloggers are addressing this topic in their posts, and it provides a fitting opportunity to discuss the role of geospatial technologies in addressing the profound global change that has far-ranging impacts on all life on our planet.

In dealing with such far-ranging change as global climate change, we are reminded of how little we know and understand regarding the interconnections between the complex systems that sustain our planet. The rising temperatures are causing more droughts and more severe storms, sea levels are rising, and these changes are causing damaging shifts in habitat that are harming plants and animals, even to the point of probable mass extinction of many species.

In order to have a measured response to such far-sweeping change, we first must get a handle on the many cross-cutting impacts that are taking place. The ecosystem-level changes that are taking place require a much broader outlook and multidisciplinary understanding of what is taking place. While the biologist may see that individual habitats are changing, they likely lack knowledge of broader ecosystem shifts and lack the data and models to be able to forecast how these shifts will trend into the future.

GIS and geospatial technologies provide the means to measure and monitor this change in common data repositories in order to compare and overlay the knowledge from different disciplines to make sense of the full scope and impact of this change. Geospatial tools allow individuals working in different locations to aggregate cross-disciplinary information about individual locations, that then spool up to knowledge about regions, countries, continents and the globe. The geospatial framework allows individual scientists to pool their knowledge and come to consensus about how this change is effecting the ability of our planet to support life in the face of this change.

As awareness of climate change impacts have been growing globally, what’s most striking is how little we understand about the implications of this change. Geospatial technologies provide the means to measure, monitor and visualize these changes in a framework that fosters collaboration and integration of knowledge for a much clearer picture of global impacts.

Without such a repository of information, we continue to work in the isolation of individual disciplines and are unable to pull together a meaningful understanding of the changes in order adapt or react. At present we’re mostly blind to the changes that are taking place on our planet as a whole, having to react after the fact when the damage has already been done. Rather than simply reacting when emergencies happen, the geospatial toolset provides a means to model this change into the future so that we can mitigate the impact before costly damage takes place.

Climate change poses a far greater threat to human civilization than individual conflicts, local natural disasters or economic crises. The impacts of this global change provides a reminder of the fragility of life on our planet, and should provide a rallying cry for collaboration and coordinated efforts. The geospatial toolset is a mature information technology that needs significant investment in order to scale more broadly to collect all that we now know in order that we may know more about what impacts are coming.

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