Sustainability is a broad concept that interlinks to all aspects of society and environment. Sustainability is widely discussed topic in today’s world, and it is extremely likely that you have heard about it. In recent years, sustainability has become a “trendy” word that is frequently used by politicians, companies, and universities alike (plus many more). Anyway, who wouldn’t like to have a “better and more sustainable future”?
The reality today is that the term sustainability can mean many things and the answer to “what is sustainability” depends a bit from who you are asking the question. For instance an energy systems engineer, biologists and social scientist might have quite different perspectives to the idea of sustainability and what they see as the most important challenges to solve in our contemporary world. Being able to communicate and discuss about these topics with individuals coming from different backgrounds is extremely important. Being able to do that, it is important that everyone of us would have at least a basic understanding about the essential concepts relating to sustainability and resilience.
The terminology for the field that conducts analytics with spatial data has had historically many names and varying definitions that have evolved over time as the technologies and the world around them has evolved. Sometimes these various definitions and naming conventions flying around in the international arenas can be quite confusing. Nevertheless, the core in most of them has always been the same: using a collection of concepts and methods drawn from geography, (spatial) statistics and computer science. These techniques deal with accessing, transforming, manipulating, visualizing, exploring and reasoning about data where the locational component is important.
