Global Mapping for Global Environment
Hiroshi Masaharu
Planning Department, Geographical Survey Institute, Japan
Abstract
A plan to prepare one millionth scale maps covering whole ground area of the earth (Global Map) is proposed for grasping global environmental conditions. An international organization should be established for this project.
1. Introduction: --- why Global Mapping Now?
Global change, such as global warming, deforestation, desertification and acid rain, is now widely recognized as one of the most important issues imposed on mankind, demanding urgent countermeasures. TO solve these problems, it is essential to grasp the present situations of global environment. Since most information on environment is related to geographical position on earth surface. maps with standardized specifications and precision covering the whole world ( Global Map) would be a basic information infrastructure for research and policy making on global environmental problems. Global maps themselves would also provide information needed to understand and analyze environmental conditions; for example, distribution of forests, residential area, road, vegetation, rivers, lakes, marshes, desert, and so forth are delineated on them.
Several attempts have been made among the international cartographic communities for global mapping. United Nations Cartographic International Map of the World on the Millionth Scale (IMW). Many countries started to prepare IMW following these resolutions and have accomplished most of the coverage by the end of the 1960,s. Many of these one millionth scale map have been kept unrevised since then. attempt can be attributed to the fact that individual countries of different financial background were responsible for mapping their own territories.
According to "World Cartography XX" (United Nation 1990) 1) 33.3% of the world is covered with maps at the scales of 1:25,000 or larger and 90.2% is covered by 1:250,000 scale range . These figures might be
considered that most of the world is already covered with medium scale maps. But in reality some of them are very old and have not been well revised. Furthermore specifications and precisions of the maps are not uniform because they have been made by each country. The conditions make it difficult to extract up-t0o-date and reliable environmental information out of the maps, and inconvenient to use them as base maps for plotting information from other sources. Consequently, the present world does not have 'Global Map' to cope with the global issues. In addition, even existing maps are not always available to the general public and foreign researchers because maps are still considered secret in some countries
The Cold War, however, has ended, and there is little reason to consider maps as a confidential property of each country. Furthermore, commercially available high resolution image data from satellites have removed the military secret tags from maps of small scale.
Recent development of satellite remote sensing technology has also made it possible to make medium to small scale maps using satellite imagery. This provides the technical basis for Global Mapping through international cooperation. Consequently, we do not have any political or technical obstacles to accomplish Global Mapping, and now is the best time to realize this huge project to save the earth from environmental devastation.
The objective of this paper is to propose a plan to make Global Map under international cooperation. The Geographical Survey Institute, Japan (GSI) carried out intensive study on the role and possible contribution of surveying and mapping organizations to global environmental problems in 1990. The results of the study were published in a report. 2) The plan of Global Mapping has been developed based on this study.
