Spatial Information and sustainable development
One of the goals of the MDGs, precisely the seventh goal, is to ensure environmental sustainability. To achieve this, information becomes a necessary tool. Since the major issues in sustainable development are resources and environment, the goal of the activities for sustainable development is therefore concerned with reasonable utilization of natural resources and effective ecosystems and environmental protection. Information on resources, ecosystems and environment becomes imperative for sustainable development decision-making. The implementation of sustainable development strategies should be based on scientific policy making, which demands great deal of real-time information. Therefore, it is one essential step to obtain real-time information and construct information systems for sustainable development. However, the peculiar nature of the built environment requires more than just any other information system but an information system capable of handling both the descriptive characteristics (attributes) and much more, the spatial component of this unique environment. This important feature is what a Geographic Information System (GIS) offers. GIS is a system implemented with computer hardware and software for the acquisition and verification, compilation, storage, updating, management and exchange, manipulation, retrieval and presentation, analysis and combination of geographic data (Benhardsen 1992). Grimshaw (1994) stressed the relevance of GIS in decision making process when he defined it as a group of procedures that provides data input, storage and retrieval, mapping and spatial analysis for both spatial and attribute data to support decision-making activities of an organization. In other words, GIS provides decision makers, especially those concerned with the built environment, ways of creating enabling scenarios for making timely and information driven decisions to solve existing or identified spatial problems.
A Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS), which is an extension on GIS, therefore becomes more relevant to generate conducive decision making environment.