Global Change

Project Title (Acronym)

Mapping Dynamics of Global Change. (Global Change)

Duration

01.03.2008 - ongoing

This co-operative work within the ÖAW-GIScience Institute explores the options to display and analyse the dynamic properties of geo-related procedures. The case studies are global long-term trends derived from history and projected into the future:

(1) land-use change and agriculture,

(2) energy demand and supply,

(3) restructuring of economic patterns.

Project Objectives

We develop several concepts and methodologies to analyse and map appropriately continuous but rapid change in natural and social spaces. For this research project we describe the dynamics of structures in space-time both at global and local levels (of e.g. deforestation, afforestation, agriculture, land use change, water as well as energy demand and supply). The project was triggered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in which each country administration is obliged to deliver convincing projections of its CO2 emissions coherent with existing change.

Research Focus

The focus of this research is on analyzing existing and develop new concepts to map such a change in the most expressive manner, which, in turn, will be used for respective projections.

Methodological approach

According to the multi-paradigmatic approaches used in most modern geography (described in H. Gebhardt’s comprehensive handbook), both a structural paradigm (based on physical geography and classical economics) and an action-oriented paradigm (based on human geography and classical climate protection) are followed when interpreting the structural shifts.

Mapping dynamics in global case studies

In order to model, represent and project geo-referenced evolutionary processes in global techno-socio-economic evolution, dynamic patterns of multi-dimensional change are extracted from the “Global Change Data Base” (GCDB). The GCDB was created over the last few years in the spirit of earlier work on climate protection scenarios and is a data infrastructure of spatially aggregated time series. Its target is to detect meta-structures in the time-space of global energy economics and global land-use change by its originally developed graphical correlation method. Organising, modelling and analysing GCDB’s data leads further to information and knowledge of feasible global change options.
Similar to the reforestation project, a project on global techno-socio-economic evolution is interested in structures underlying large data sets: Systematic patterns and their dynamic shifts are searched for in economy and land-use change by spatially analyzing the "Global Change Data Base". As an example, in most developed countries the increase in "energy demand per capita" already starts to slow down. This gives rise to hope that climate protection measures might be supported by autopoietic long-term trends towards more energy-efficient economic structures.

ÖAW-GIScience Contact Person

Gilbert Ahamer, Josef Strobl