Towards Mitigating Climate Change Threats to Small Island States Coastal Communities: Geomatics Contributions in a Holistic Governance Approach

Coastal regions are of much importance to human socio-economic activities. As a result much of the world’s population live along, or within 150 km of, coasts. Increasing coastal populations, especially in Small Island Developing States (SIDS), are on a collision course with climate change. Climate change is now considered a very real international threat. Sea level rise and other climate change phenomena such as increased frequencies of storms and hurricanes, and flooding from storm surges threaten SIDS. A community’s ability to mitigate or adapt to the effects of climate change depends on that community’s vulnerability to change, resilience, and adaptive capacity. Diminishing communities’ vulnerabilities while strengthening their resilience and adaptive capacities depends upon, in part, access to relevant information, including spatial information managed via geomatics technologies. Typically, however, governance in SIDS is not holistic, lacking implemented collaborative, integrative, or cooperative frameworks. This often means that needed information resides in sectoral or departmental databases without any easy sharing mechanism to facilitate informed and holistic decision making. Geomatics technologies can provide frameworks for sharing spatial information in a manner that facilitates holistic governance that in turn can be more efficient in aiding coastal communities to mitigate or adapt to climate change threats.