Climate Action 2011-2012

Special Feature
Esri
Adapting to climate change
GeoDesign provides a framework for action
By Jack Dangermond, President and CEO, Esri
The Earth’s climate is changing, leading to serious problems
such as food security, health, and public safety for humanity.
As our environment changes around us, we need to
adapt swiftly. But where do we start? Should we reinforce
or rebuild existing structures? Or should we abandon
existing settlements and relocate the population in some
cases? And how can mass rebuilding/relocation efforts be
best accomplished from the human, environmental, and
economic perspectives?
GeoDesign is a framework for understanding the complex
relationships between human designed settlements and
the changing environment, for quickly planning ways to
adapt existing communities and build new ones in a more
sustainable manner. This methodology helps us to assess risk,
identify change, create synergies, develop strategies, adapt to
change, and monitor the results. A merging of geographic
information system (GIS) technology with spatial design
principles, GeoDesign takes an interdisciplinary, synergistic
approach to solve the critical problems of future design to
optimise location, orientation, and the features of projects
from local to global scales.
By bringing social, environmental, agricultural,
meteorological, and other sciences into a common
geographic perspective, people can better see the optimal
solutions needed for planning and building our future.
Governments, NGO’s, businesses, and civil society
communities already use the GeoDesign approach to
minimise climate impacts, increase resiliency, predict cause
and effect, calculate sustainability capacity, rank risk levels,
allocate resources, and prioritise action.
By incorporating geographic technologies such as
visualisation and modeling into the analysis of community
development, people can intelligently answer far reaching
design questions such as these.
The GeoDesign framework lets us design and test various
alternatives, thereby helping to make the most educated
and informed decisions for adapting human kind to a
rapidly changing environment and world. It acknowledges
the inseparable relationship between society and nature
and lets us take an active role in designing where and how
we live.
Climate change is a geographic problem that needs
a geographic system to solve it. A GeoDesign-based
framework for climate science gives us hope. With it we
can gain a scientific understanding of Earth’s complex
systems at a truly global scale and make thoughtful,
informed design decisions that ultimately allow communities
and nature to coexist more harmoniously.
14 climateactionprogramme.org
© Esri
Climate change is a geographic problem that needs a geographic system to solve it.