Of Climate Change, Environmental Disaster and Geospatial Technology #GWF

Dr. F.  J. Radermacher, Director, Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing spoke to the Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad, India.  His remarks focused on the how technology must be used to balance growth with environmental impacts. His comments are paraphrased below.

Geospatial technology is a wonderful field for mathematicians. India and China are the places where the future of humankind will be strongly influenced and about where we go with the enormous growth in population to be expected.

Can you guarantee the growth and stability of the country for years to come? The issues of sustainability are on the table along with the environment, the social side of life and the economy. The economy is important because we expect the goods to be delivered. [The economy] must serve the people and, but is must respect the environment as well to serve the people in the years to come. The economy is already over stressing the environment. A world of 7 billion people where 1 billion are rich but 6 billion that are emerging and relatively poor. Assuming that we deliver what we do today for a world with 10 billion people, it will result in an ecological disaster. One option: we could make people poorer but you sacrifice the people to save the environment. On the other hand, if you care for the dignity for the social side, this will be unsustainable. So is there a third way? We need growth in India but the growth must be neutral concerning the environment and concerning the climate.

The “joker” in this [solution] is technology. Technology is the key and in particular GIS technology. With innovation in technology we can deliver more goods and services to more people with less resources, if we do it right.  We somehow must guarantee that we have better options with less pollution and less emissions of climate gases. We need innovation in governments as much as we need innovations in technology.

It is not enough to have a free market system but you need a societal custom to take care of every individual to have access to education and health services.  Economic system is fine but you need a cultural framework under which this works. We live in a world of scarce resources.