Spatial data infrastructure convergence: building spatial data infrastructure bridges to address climate change

Abstract

Climate change is the greatest social, economic, and environmental challenge of the present time. Researchers working in the field of climate science argue that the issues of regional climate change are as complicated as global issues. Many climate models have been developed to monitor climate change and its future impact. Spatial information is especially important for climate models as it offers a great capacity in both spatial and temporal dimensions to project climate change. Furthermore, a collaborative input from a wide range of stakeholders is needed for mitigation of and adaptation to climate change issues. Hence, the development of SDI offers great potential to study climate change at regional level. The catchment-based approach is already proved to be an effective management approach for natural resources management, including land and water. This management approach is implemented through the creation of partnerships between different levels of government, community groups, industry groups, and academia. The current SDI development migrated from the initial top-down national approach to bottom-up sub-national and cross-jurisdictional approach. Now the concept of a more inclusive model of SDI governance is emerging, wherein grass-root level citizens and community members can participate for environmental decisions and their sustainability. The catchment SDI offers a great opportunity to build new institutional arrangements and governance models for better catchment management outcomes. The five components of SDI enable practitioners to understand the complex issues regarding catchment management and regional climate change, and develop SDI at regional scale. This integrated catchment SDI model can assist in the development of a framework to integrate multi-source spatial data sets to respond to the many climate change issues.