Environmental Informatics for Sustainable Development

The targets of sustainable consumption and development require strong contributions across the economic, social and environmental sector. Amongst others, research activities on impact assessment, integrated modelling, simulations and policy analysis related to the environment put high demands on the information science community. The large amounts of data sets require data–intensive technologies to enable data access, processing, analysis and visualization. Due to the high degree of spatial, temporal and semantic heterogeneity between data sets – but also of simulation, analyses and processing algorithms – the requested high quality scientific contributions to software tools and applications for grand environmental challenges can rarely be provided in a timely manner nor reused in further scenarios with similar needs and requirements. Policy makers, modelers and environmentalists still miss maintainable implementations from the evironmental informatics community to address challenges, such as sustainable use of natural resources, and biodiversity loss. This article briefly explores the notion of Sustainable Development in general and then focuses on the demands for software applications and related Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the environmental sector in particular. It provides a detailed description of Environmental Informatics and its possible contributions to the sustainable development arena. Finally, it identifies opportunities for subsequent development steps based on relevant and evolving ICT technologies. This particularly addresses how the potential range of ICT technologies can be combined, used, and re-used to promote scalable, evolutionary, and easy maintainable environmental software products. The Internet and its future evolvement are identified as fundamental enabling technologies.

GRANELL CANUT Carlos;  SCHADE Sven; 

2016-02-29

Information Science Reference (IGI Global)

JRC85967

9781466658882,   

http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/environmental-informatics-for-sustainable-development/112717,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC85967,   

10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch287,