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.
Read Jeff Thurston’s thought on this subject here.
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In response to the question of how GIS is related to sustainability (particularly the energy management/carbon footprint management aspects). There is a rudimentary toolkit to address the topic using GIS.
Here is a link to the slide show and the data model to get started.
http://www.magicgis.org/magic/symposiums/2008/presentations/green_tmarti222.pdf
http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=downloads.dataModels.filteredGateway&dmid=45
First off, think of this in a full lifecycle perspective:
Planning
Designing
Building
Operations and Maintenance
Re-design
Re-model
Recycle
Re-plan
Etc.
We have used GIS in the planning part of this cycle for years but now we are merging GIS into the design, building (schedule management, supply footprint, logistics, etc.), O&M (supply, energy, space management, work order management, waste stream management, etc), and recycling portions of the life cycle. The ability of GIS to track things in 4 dimensions is key to this as we can track, not only where, but also when, things happen.
The second thing to keep in mind is that Geography is the key organizing principle for almost anything that has to do with distribution or abundance in space and time. For example, we have long recognized that geography is the best way to organize information about ecological issues like the distribution and abundance of species. The way we understand that distribution and abundance is by looking at the correlation of information from layers of information associated with distribution and abundance such as slope, elevation, latitude, longitude, competition, predation, vegetation etc. Once we see a correlation we can use science as a tool to ask questions about how to explain the correlation (ie why do we have a low density of prey when we have a high density of predators). The key here is that ANYTHING that is distributed in space and time can be organized geographically. The fundamental questions of ecology are the fundamental questions of economics too.
To extrapolate this to energy and carbon footprint management and global sustainability: geography drives the cost of heating, cooling, and lighting (eg polar climates need heat and light and equatorial climates need cooling), geography drives logistics (where the resources are and where the resources are consumed are in different places), and geography drives what alternative sources of energy are available (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and tidal power alternatives).
In short this is really a question of global distribution and abundance of resources (carbon dioxide production/energy use and carbon sequestration/vegetation distribution/type/density) and population over time or global ecological footprinting (the sum total of the resource cost per person on the planet). This means the real issue is sustainability or making sure the global ecological footprint of people does not exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.
GIS was developed as a toolkit for managing problems of distribution and abundance of things in space and time. We are just applying this to a new problem (Carbon Footprint Management) in a bigger context: global climate change. The approach has always been: break the problem down into simple layers, understand the relationship between the feature classes, make management decisions, see what works, determine site suitability for alternatives, adapt to changes, track results, and share information. This approach works for a single building, a campus, a corporation, or a planet.
Finally, GIS is evolving. Today there is a move toward “dashboards” or “cockpits” as a way to use your computer to manage your work. The idea behind a “dashboard” is that the GIS gives you a, customized, view of the world and you can connect to various sensor feeds (databases and meters) that act like the gauges in a car or airplane. You look at the map to see the things you are interested in (eg bank branch offices), you look at the gauges to see how they are doing (eg red, green, yellow or bar graphs) and you “drive” or “fly” the buildings, much as you would a car or airplane, by taking actions (making decisions) and monitoring the effects. These dashboards are at three levels: Project (what you need to do your job), management (what management needs eg a view of all the branches and the ability to zoom in to the project level), and the executive or global view (show me the global economic picture, highlight banking, show me energy use by country). You could call this a Geographic Information Integration System. The point is that we can now create dashboard and fuse the information we need, in a geographic context, to support the decisions that need to be made to deal with global cliamte change on every level. We have the technology and approach we just need to use it.
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