The Importance of Collaborative Mapping Systems for Climate Change and Environmental Challenges

Understanding the Climate Crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction

The Earth is currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction, also known as the Anthropocene extinction, which is primarily caused by human activities. Unlike previous extinction events caused by natural phenomena, the sixth mass extinction is driven by human activities, including deforestation, climate change, and pollution. The current extinction rate is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates, with projections suggesting up to one million species could become extinct within the next few decades. This alarming rate of species loss threatens important ecological functions that support human life on Earth, such as a stable climate, predictable regional precipitation patterns, and productive farmland and fisheries.

The primary causes of the sixth mass extinction include habitat loss, climate change, pollution, overfishing, and poaching. Habitat loss, particularly driven by deforestation, urbanization, and agriculture, is the leading cause of species extinction as it destroys natural habitats and leads to soil erosion. Climate change significantly contributes to this crisis by altering natural habitats through rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and more frequent extreme weather events. For example, coral reefs are at risk of extinction due to ocean acidification caused by rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Climate Change Impacts on Food Security and Resources

Climate change is causing severe environmental impacts that directly affect food security and resource availability worldwide. Currently, 40% of all land has been converted for food production, with agriculture responsible for 90% of global deforestation and 70% of the planet's freshwater use. This unsustainable land use significantly contributes to habitat destruction and species extinction by altering natural environments. Furthermore, the climate crisis is exacerbating these challenges by causing extreme weather events such as severe droughts and intense storms, which create additional stress on ecosystems and make certain habitats inhospitable for native species.

The intertwined relationships among food systems, climate change, and biodiversity loss create immense pressure on our planet. These connections have real-world consequences, as increased droughts and floods make it more difficult to maintain crops and produce sufficient food in some regions. Global food insecurity has risen substantially since pre-pandemic times, further exacerbated by extreme weather, climate change, and conflicts around the world. This creates a dangerous cycle where environmental degradation leads to food shortages, which can then drive further exploitation of natural resources.

The Interconnected Nature of Environmental Challenges

Species do not exist in isolation; they are interconnected through complex ecological relationships. When one species becomes extinct or its population declines significantly, other species in the ecosystem are affected, impacting overall ecosystem functionality and the benefits it provides to humans and other organisms. Monitoring population trends is critical because they serve as indicators of ecosystem health, with serious declines signaling ecosystem breakdown and warning of larger systems failures.

The sixth mass extinction is having significant effects on our planet, including biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and disruption of ecosystem services. Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is essential for ecosystem functioning, and its loss can lead to decreased ecosystem productivity with significant impacts on human societies. Essential ecosystem services, such as the provision of clean air and water, are being disrupted by the ongoing extinction crisis. Beyond environmental impacts, the sixth mass extinction also has significant social and economic consequences, with many communities relying on natural resources for their livelihoods.

The Role of Mapping Systems in Addressing Environmental Challenges

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mapping technologies play a crucial role in addressing climate change and environmental challenges by providing frameworks to understand and visualize complex data. GIS connects data to maps, integrating location information with descriptive data to provide foundations for analysis used across various scientific disciplines and industries. These systems help users understand patterns, relationships, and geographic context, resulting in improved communication, efficiency, and decision-making.

Mapping systems are particularly valuable for environmental applications, enabling predictions and informed decisions that benefit both people and the planet. These systems can model potential scenarios to address complex challenges like climate resilience and sustainability. For example, GIS analysis can identify where adding green spaces would reduce extreme heat for vulnerable populations or where expected population growth would support business expansion. This technology is also vital for protecting people and saving lives before, during, and after emergencies such as hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes.

Types of Mapping Systems and Their Applications

There are several types of mapping systems that serve different purposes in environmental monitoring and management. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer-based mapping systems that help visualize data, allowing users to overlay multiple information layers, perform spatial analysis, and gain meaningful insights. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) use satellites to determine exact locations on Earth's surface, providing precise location data for mapping, navigation, and tracking. Remote sensing technologies gather information on Earth's surface using sensors on planes or satellites, enabling the capture of images and other geospatial data for monitoring environmental changes. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) uses lasers to measure distances and create precise 3D representations of the Earth's surface for terrain mapping.

These mapping technologies have advanced significantly, creating more accurate maps that provide dynamic and up-to-date information. Modern mapping can show smaller features like buildings, roads, and natural elements with greater clarity, helping users navigate and explore surroundings more effectively. Today's mapping technology provides real-time information on conditions like traffic, road closures, and weather, making it invaluable for monitoring environmental changes and responding to climate challenges.

Benefits of Mapping Systems for Environmental Management

Systems mapping is a powerful tool for understanding and visualizing complex interrelationships within social or environmental systems. It provides a way to identify the structural causes of policy challenges and potential additional benefits that may result from specific courses of action. By mapping the connections between different factors that influence outcomes, stakeholders can develop a common understanding of complex systems and identify potential intervention points.

Geographic mapping technology helps us understand and visualize information about Earth's surface, track movement, and monitor environmental changes. It's particularly valuable for making predictions and informed decisions that benefit both people and the planet by modeling possible scenarios to address complex challenges like climate resilience and sustainability. The greatest challenges we face are inseparable from their geography, and GIS technology allows us to unravel complex issues such as climate change, sustainability, and social inequity to discover where action should be taken.

Mapping Systems for Climate Change Solutions

Mapping technologies are being actively used to address climate change through various innovative approaches. For example, in a challenge organized by Esri, developers were encouraged to build apps that help communities become more environmentally resilient and sustainable. The resulting applications included tools for modeling community erosion from climate change, solar suitability analysis, water conservation tracking, coastal resilience planning, and urban heat risk exploration. These tools demonstrate how mapping technology can be applied to specific environmental challenges, providing solutions that help communities adapt to and mitigate climate change impacts.

Climate-focused geocollaboration portals, like those hosted by Esri, contain maps and applications organized into sections such as disaster resilience, climate resilience, economic resilience, public safety resilience, and transportation and infrastructure resilience. These portals include data from various government agencies such as NOAA, FEMA, and the US Forest Service, serving as starting points for open data and ideas that evolve over time as more scientists, governments, and the public use them. This collaborative approach brings together individuals and organizations who use GIS to combat climate change impacts, building both a knowledge base and practical tools that people around the world can use to build resilient communities.

The Importance of Collaboration in Mapping Efforts

Climate change and its effects are fundamentally geographic challenges that require a geographic approach, where we endeavor to understand the constraints a changing climate imposes upon terrestrial and aquatic systems. Geography provides a powerful multidimensional framework enabling scientists to explore data layers, discover patterns, and test alternative scenarios to understand risks, develop adaptation strategies, and increase society's resilience to climate change. By serving landscape layers as live image services (actual data rather than pictures of data), citizens, scientists, and policymakers can ask questions that honor the complexity of the data.

In collaboration with various partners, new landscape data layers and modeling tools are being developed and made available to researchers and planners, enabling the discovery of patterns that inform agricultural practices to reduce hunger, increase food production, and improve climate resilience. Given the increasing pressures from climate change, land degradation, population growth, and demand for food, GIS's role in informing solutions is becoming even more critical. Now more than ever, GIS is positioned to support researchers and farmers with tools to understand and respond to changing agricultural patterns.

Existing Collaborative Mapping Initiatives

Several notable collaborative mapping initiatives are already addressing climate and environmental challenges. For instance, Planet, Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington are collaborating to develop high-resolution, comprehensive, and up-to-date population maps, starting in low-resource/high-climate-stress countries. This collaboration uses satellite imagery, AI, and spatial demography to create maps that can help model exposure to climate-linked migration risks, food insecurity, disease burden, and other contemporary hazards.

The White House's Climate Data Initiative represents another significant collaborative effort, with Esri joining Microsoft and other tech companies to provide technology and expertise. As part of this initiative, Esri is providing geospatial technology and expertise to cities to build maps and applications for planning for climate change impacts, hosting free maps and applications through a climate-focused geocollaboration portal, and sponsoring an app challenge for solutions to climate-related issues. This collaboration allows climate data from organizations like NOAA and USGS to be accessed as map services, empowering state, local, and private-sector organizations with tools that bring climate change information to life.

Proprietary and Open-Source Mapping Systems

There are both proprietary and open-source mapping systems that offer different advantages. Esri builds ArcGIS, one of the world's most powerful GIS software solutions, which integrates and connects data through the context of geography. Organizations that use ArcGIS to understand and analyze their data in geographic context gain a distinct advantage in decision-making. Esri was founded to help solve some of the world's most difficult problems through a commitment to science, sustainability, community, education, research, and positive change.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) presents an alternative approach as a free, open map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial and satellite imagery, and import from other freely licensed geodata sources. The OSM approach has both strengths and limitations compared to proprietary systems. While OSM data can be superior for certain applications like mapping hiking trails and rural areas, it may lack real-time traffic information that systems like Google Maps provide through data harvesting from phones and car navigation systems.

Collaborative Systems Mapping for Climate Resilience

Systems mapping approaches are being successfully applied to enhance climate resilience through collaboration. For example, Transport for London (TfL) and the wider London land-based transport sector developed a new approach for understanding interdependency risks as part of their Adaptation Reporting Power submissions. This method combined systems mapping with climate change risk assessment to create a structured stakeholder engagement process with other asset owners, jointly developing a comprehensive understanding of interdependencies and climate risks. This provided a platform to collaboratively identify and prioritize potential measures to mitigate those risks.

When infrastructure assets are affected by climate change and severe weather, the impacts can cascade from one sector to another. For instance, a storm can cause a power outage, which results in traffic lights failing and traffic grinding to a halt, leading to the unavailability of people and goods with further impacts. The interdependencies between infrastructure assets significantly influence their collective resilience, highlighting the need for collaborative mapping approaches that can capture these complex relationships.

Creating a Unified Mapping System: Possibilities and Challenges

Creating a unified mapping system that integrates data from various sources presents both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, it's quite strange to see many companies compiling essentially the same dataset for themselves when it might make more sense to use a shared resource like OpenStreetMap. This realization has led companies like Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft to contribute to OpenStreetMap, similar to how IBM and others invested in Linux in the early 2000s as a way to place competitive pressure on dominant players.

However, there are challenges in integrating mapping datasets from different sources. These include overlaps between mapping datasets when there's a lack of coordination or integration among different organizations, which can lead to duplicate features or conflicting attributes in overlapping areas. Data failures, such as incomplete, outdated, or erroneous mapping data, can arise from limited data collection resources or human errors during data processing. Addressing these challenges requires identifying overlaps, resolving conflicts, ensuring consistency across multiple sources, implementing data quality control measures, and standardizing data formats.

The Win-Win Benefits of Collaborative Mapping

Collaborative mapping approaches offer significant benefits for both environmental management and business applications. Systems mapping helps partnerships understand the systems they're working in before and during implementation, allowing them to design innovative solutions targeting system leverage points, identify the right partners and champions to engage, align on a systems understanding and transformation vision, adapt to changes, and evaluate whether the partnership is contributing to systems change.

For businesses, GIS helps make better decisions about growth or service expansion by revealing where the best customers are located and where to find more of them. When selecting ideal locations for new retail stores, distribution hubs, or service facilities, GIS can bring together all relevant information for decision-making, including nearby features, travel times, population numbers, local demographics, site suitability, and competitor locations. GIS also makes logistics operations more efficient and adaptable, reducing costs and emissions while keeping drivers safe and customers satisfied.

Future Directions in Collaborative Mapping

The future of mapping systems will likely include even greater accuracy and precision, increased focus on real-time dynamic mapping, and enhanced integration with technologies like augmented reality (AR). AR technologies will overlay digital mapping information onto the real-world environment, improving navigation, exploration, and understanding of spatial data. These advancements will enhance not only environmental monitoring capabilities but also practical applications across various sectors.

Advances in cloud-based systems are transforming mapping by providing scalability that allows mapping processes to handle large volumes of data and complex computational tasks. Cloud infrastructure enables mapping applications to scale based on demand, ensuring efficient processing and analysis of geospatial data. With data integration being a noted challenge, cloud-based systems help solve this problem through collaborative, centralized data management where multiple users from various locations or organizations can simultaneously work on the same dataset with access to real-time information.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The path to creating a unified mapping system that addresses climate change and environmental challenges requires collaboration across sectors and organizations. As Jack Dangermond, president of Esri, stated, "We felt it was important to establish this collaborative network of individuals and organizations who use GIS to come together to combat the impacts of climate change". Through such collaboration, both a knowledge base and real-world tools will be created that people around the globe can use to build more resilient communities.

By combining the strengths of proprietary systems like Esri and Microsoft with open-source platforms like OpenStreetMap, and integrating data from services like TomTom and Apple Maps, a comprehensive mapping resource can be developed that serves both environmental and business needs. This collaborative approach not only enhances our understanding of complex environmental challenges but also provides practical tools for addressing them. As our planet faces increasing pressures from climate change, such collaboration becomes not just beneficial but essential for creating the future we want to see.