Social Environmental Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change — Climate Change: A Perspective From Geomatics and Geospatial Analysis & Modeling

Daniel M. López L.

Geospatial Information Science Research Center, Mexico

Abstract: The global environmental change is defined as the combination of modifications in the Atmosphere-Ocean-Biosphere Earth system on planetary scale. These modifications lead, among others, to the terrestrial warming, the modification of the biodiversity, desertification, acid precipitations and the eutrophication of waters. Climatic change, a main component of the global environmental change, is caused direct or indirectly by human activity. The climatic change takes place in a time in which the stability and resilience of the ecosystems are in risk due to the anthropogenic impact induced by the development at the expense of the deterioration or sustainability of the natural resources. Vulnerability defined as the degree of susceptibility or incapacity of a system to respond to the adverse effects of the climatic change (it includes the climatic variability and extreme events) describes a central concept in the investigation of climatic change, as well as, in the communities of investigation related to hazard and natural risk, poverty and development, food security and sustainability science. Geomatic and spatio-temporal analysis and modeling have played a fundamental roll in the characterization analysis and assessment of vulnerability to climatic change. The contribution of the remote sensing includes the study and monitoring of drives forces (perturbations, stress) on human-environment system, the study, monitoring and location of exposure system and its sensitivity conditions and monitoring of the impacts on the system. In the future, due to the growth of users communities, to the greater sophistication of his needs and to the exponential increase in the volume and complexity of the data, it will be need to migrate towards a new paradigm in the interaction data - users of remote sensing in which the emergent technologies will be able to offer new alternatives allowing that, automatic or semiautomatic information and knowledge can be generated by support of intelligent learning system. On the other hand, in the vulnerability assessment, the analysis and spatial modeling face new challenges such as: How link the global, National, regional, and local scales. How to solve scale mismatches in social-Ecological system. To respond to some of these questions, there are proposals toward integration of spatial data processes and data models, which can facilitate the search of spatio-temporal knowledge within processes on agents or individuals’ level. In the same way, agent-based modeling, together with other recent technologies such as location aware technologies, mobile objects data bases, and the spatio-temporal knowledge discovery can allow in the future advancing towards a people-based perspective, which is centered on individuals and in the space-time, which would facilitate modeling of complex processes as vulnerability to the environmental and climatic change.

Key words: global environmental change, climate change, vulnerability, geomatic, spatial analyses, modelling