FIG 2010: Facing the Challenges, Building the Capacity

FIG Achievements

FIG is an organisation with a strong social conscience. FIG President Stig Enemark explained how it has aligned its ten commissions to the UN’s Millenium Development Goals and in particular to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. Enemark’s goal for FIG is “Building Capacity through Flying High and keeping its feet on the ground”.  The Flying High part is in gaining recognition at the highest level with the United Nations by working closely with its agencies. The Feet on the Ground part is professional and institutional development at regional, national and local level.

ISA President Jim Curnow and FIG President Stig Enemark sign the Joint venture Agreement for the FIG Congress 2010 in Sydney.

Enemark says the role of the surveyor is changing from one of high level expert in measurement science to managing the measurement. With so much technology now doing the hack work, surveyors can and should contribute to building sustainable societies as experts in managing land and property.  For example, traditional cadastral systems do not cater for the 70% of the world’s population that live in customary tenure or informal settlements (slums). More flexible systems are needed and land professionals need to get their heads around these.  They offer big opportunities for the industry.

FIG launched a prototype of a  “Pro-Poor Tool” this week called the Social Tenure Domain Model which provides flexible, unconventional land administration. Instead of dealing with owners and land parcels it has ‘parties’ (a person, tribe or agency) who may be identified by photo or finger print, ‘spatial units’ (may be a photo of the land or text description “from the river to the tree”) and ‘social tenure relationships’ such as customary, hunting or grazing rights’.  Recording these could help when the mining or logging company comes along and says “we own this land”.  It was interesting to hear frequent use of the term “land professional” in place of “surveyor” – to capture the wider remit of the job which now covers Land administration, land development, land policies, tenure and value and land use.

Echoeing Tim Flannery’s exhortation to “take leadership in dealing with key global challenges,”  Enemark showed a series of world maps. In the first, country size was adjusted based on GDP, showing a bloated Europe and North America and skinny Africa. A map for carbon emissions looked pretty similar but India and China had grown. A third showed the expected mortality increase based on climate change. This time Africa was seriously bloated.

Mapping the comparison of GDP across the world helps put the relative sizes of the world's economies in perspective. Image Source: Worldmapper

These images stay in the mind long after the statistics are forgotten. According to Enemark it is our responsibility to bring this map back to scale.  The FIG commission partners with UN agencies such as FAO, World Bank and UN Habitat, hold “working weeks” and publish very readable reports on www.fig.net They  are not organised by technology or narrow discipline but instead they bring many professionals together and apply the full power of spatial tools over several years so they can really get their teeth into problems such as rapid urbanisation and megacities, administering marine species, and secure land tenure.

Why to Kangaroos hop?

Keynote speaker at the 24^th FIG conference in Sydney last week was Tim Flannery, writer, professor and conservationist and “one of the great explorers of modern time” according to Sir David Attenborough.  Expanding on the conference theme “Facing the challenges, building the capacity” Flannery, who is chairman of the International Climate Change Council, homed in on the role of surveyors and land professionals in both contributing to solutions for climate change and convincing the public to take it seriously.

The FIG 2010 keynote was given by Tim Flannery, one of the world's leading writer-scientists and thinkers and an internationally acclaimed explorer and environmentalist.

According to Flannery, "Australia is expected to be hardest hit amongst developed nations by climate change because we are already living on the edge, in an extremely harsh environment. In this most ancient of lands, soils are impoverished, water holes are far apart and nutrients scarce. This is why kangaroos hop. It is by the far the most efficient way of travelling because each bounce –like a pogo stick- gives impetus for the next. It is also why gum trees don’t drop their leaves because it takes too much effort to grow new ones.  It is also why koalas have a vacant expression and sleep a lot. The gum trees they feed on release toxins to discourage them from eating the leaves. Koalas have to expend a lot of energy getting rid of these toxins and so, since the brain demands a lot of energy, they have made the evolutionary choice to have small brains."

Over the next century the water in the oceans will get warmer and will expand. Sea levels will rise by 3mm per year around the world, but around Australia they are expected to rise by 8mm. Over the next century this means a rise of 1.1 meters, inundating or endangering over a quarter of a million homes. Schools, ports, hospitals and airports will be impacted.

Yet Australians, most of whom live in the more comfortable coastal fringe, are resistant to the concept of climate change. 8mm a year is still too small to be felt.  Which brings us to Surveyors and land professionals because of our ability to measure and locate. “You are custodians of enabling technology that can explain the consequences of these changes such as bio-diversity loss, the impact on food production and national boundaries”.  Surveyors played a defining role in exploring and building modern Australia. Now, we must take on a new and equally active role. “We must start investing money and time now, so that we don’t leave our children with so big a problem that they don’t have the capacity to deal with it” said Flannery.

But his parting message was upbeat. “Go away energised and full of optimism for what you can deliver for a sustainable future”.

Rapid Urbanisation and Megacities

In 1900 13% of the world’s population was urbanised. In 1950 it was 29%, 2005 49% and by 2030 it will be 60%. (4.9 billion people according to UN statistics). Athens gains 4,000 newcomers every week. One third of all city dwellers live in slums. We already have ten megacities with over 10 million inhabitants including Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Istanbul, London, New York and Lagos and they are growing fast. Those that are not already showing signs of stress know they will in the future. The world’s largest 20 cities consume 80% of the world’s energy and the battle for climate change will be won or lost in the cities.

Since 2007, FIG commission number 3 Spatial Information Management under chairman Dr Chrissy Potsiou, has been researching the problems and identifying the spatial tools and data infrastructure to make policies sustainable and successful. Governance is just as important as technology.  The commission conducted site visits to megacities where they interviewed city administrators, and sent out questionnaires.

Paul Kelly summarised the problems including garbage treatment, traffic, energy, fresh water,  ‘informal development’ and rapid growth. All have a spatial dimension and what came across so strongly from all the speakers was the sense of urgency. City managers wanted stronger planning laws, better disaster preparedness, coordinated planning and implementation of transport and utilities and input into capital and property markets.

Rapid urbanisation means there is no time to create a cadastre in the traditional sense. Data volumes are huge;  data comes in varied resolution levels and accuracies and is collected and maintained by different institutions. Getting hold of it is costly and slow. Metadata is missing, yet there is an urgent need to merge data from different sources. Incoming commission Chair Yerach Doytscher gave a quick run through of the different integration techniques – wrappers for merging on the fly, conflation (rubber sheeting and transformation) and fusion. The commission report FIG Publication No 48 “Rapid Urbanization and Mega Cities: The Need for Spatial Information Management” goes into much more detail.

FIG stresses the need for rapid land administration for economic growth, promoting their Social Tenure Domain Model which provides flexible, unconventional land administration.

New technology can help – Lidar can collect 100,000 points a second. Urban sensing technology can be used to track individuals or vehicles as they move around the city, recording air pollution or traffic jams. “We have the mission but we need to supply the vision” said Doytscher, adding that the commission’s work is ongoing and they are looking for more people to get involved. The next “working week” is in Budapest in November.

City managers reported that spatial tools were crucial to doing their job but that was also where they had most problems. While they all had some sort of SDI, GIS groups were in silos with little influence over other units and were not in a position to create a more powerful SDI. The basic requirement was a base map and common street address files and they needed to solve internal institutional and people problems to promote greater sharing. They wanted a broader understanding in the city administration of the benefits of an SDI, more resources to build one and an agreed spatial strategy. London has one, as does Tokyo. Seoul is going that way. The big need is for data now. They cannot wait.

Jose Diacono is with Communica Marketing in Australia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.