Working Towards Sustainable Development: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Geographic Information Systems

The twenty-first century will be faced with the challenge of addressing two major issues: the environment and human rights. In this web site, I explore the often-neglected propinquity of those two issues by addressing the sustainable development of the environment within indigenous communities using new technologies. While advocacy for the preservation of indigenous land or rights may be overlooked, disregarded or even contested by the Geomatic community, there are a number of researchers who have incorporated indigenous knowledge into their prior investigation of a particular region using advanced information technologies like Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing. This integration is a result of researchers recognizing that a GIS is efficient, but limited in scope.

This web site will investigate the combined use of indigenous knowledge and GIS for sustainable development.

The questions the site proposes are:

What can an indigenous population hope to gain from implementing a GIS? (See What is CBNRM?)

What can a GIS team expect to gain from addressing indigenous knowledge in their research? (See GIS and Indigenous Knowledge come together: Case Studies)