Maps can and should be used to build understanding and illuminate pathways towards a sustainable world. To address this transdisciplinary challenge, to explore how cartography and geospatial data can support sustainable development, the Workshop for Cartography and Sustainable Development brought together international experts, educators, government officials, students, and practitioners. Small islands are hubs of innovation and knowledge leaders in sustainability and resilience. Islands are facing sustainability challenges decades ahead of the rest of the world, meaning they are also the first to find solutions. The University of Aruba was the perfect location for this workshop as it is home to the Sustainable Island Solutions through Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (SISSTEM) academic program. This interdisciplinary program is trailblazing, in which research and teaching directly serve the residents and students of the island (and islands more broadly), ensuring that solutions are generated by islanders for islanders to support a comfortable livelihood for generations to come. Workshop participants were eager to learn from the successes of this program.
The University of Aruba hosted this three-day event (January 26-28, 2026), in collaboration with Utrecht University Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, the International Cartographic Association (ICA), and sponsored by GIS4C. On the first day of the workshop, participants met and enjoyed a curated sustainable island tour. The main event was Tuesday with formal presentations. On the final day, in the morning, participants met with members of the Aruba Sustainable Development Goal Task Force to exchange ideas. In the afternoon, workshop participants gathered to outline ideas to start assembling a shared publication. Read the full details of each event below.
Day 1: Sustainability Island Tour of Aruba
To start the workshop, it is important for the international participants to learn more about sustainability challenges and successes on islands, all while learning and mingling with our local hosts from Aruba. Eric Mijts guided the tour. He is the founder of the Sustainable Island Solutions through Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (SISSTEM) program at the University of Aruba and is an expert on challenges for island sustainability. This tour was also a fantastic way for workshop participants to better understand the geography of the island, while getting to know each other and exchanging ideas in an informal setting. We started the tour at the University of Aruba, where we got in 3 different cars. At each stop, we switched cars to ensure we got a chance to speak to everyone.
First stop was the Bubali Bird Sanctuary. We climbed a high tower overlooking the manmade freshwater lagoon behind the hotels. This is where the brown and grey water collects. This has become a bird refuge – beautiful birds congregate here, making a dynamic place to visit, a surprising result.
We toured the beautiful mangroves at Mangel Halto – we discussed their boundless ecosystem services while physically feeling the dramatic cooling shade, and watching the fish swim around their roots. We observed and discussed some of the human-caused harm to their health and future growth. Interactive 360 video from the tour of Maarten Eppinga telling us about Mangroves – click this link and then move your phone around to see all around the mangroves – join us on this stop of the tour!
We also viewed the landfill that is now decommissioned and discussed waste disposal on small islands and abroad, we observed the desalination plant (there is no fresh water on the island – all water we drink and shower with is desalinated!!!), and viewed the emissions as we passed through. Wastewater treatment plants and landfills – these are all places we use every day, at home and abroad, but rarely think about them. Our waste simply disappears. On a small island, it is more visible–fewer places to hide waste.
Next, we enjoyed a delicious lunch together at Kamani’s Kitchen, where we enjoyed local delicacies. We admired the murals in San Nicolaas and learned more about Aruban culture and values.
For our final stop of the tour, we visited the ruins of the Balashi Gold Mines. We had a beautiful view of Spanish Lagoon Mangroves – a protected RAMSAR site.
This tour was inspiring for us all to create a sustainability tour for our own students – at each of our home institutions, we could make a field trip showing our students where our waste and wastewater and other local context related to sustainability as a point to discuss new possibilities and make maps of the waste!
I think we would all agree that this sustainable island tour was a highlight of the workshop for all of us!
Visit with us in this 360 video of Eric Mijts explaining to students about the Schoco Owls in 2025
Check out this ArcGIS StoryMap that was made with students in 2022.
The course Consultancy Project Aruba, with students from Utrecht University together with students at the University of Aruba – that Eric Mijts also coordinates, was the inspiration for this workshop the location of this workshop.
Day 2 Presentation 27 January 2026
Presentations throughout the day showcased:
🗺️ Applications of Cartography, GIS, and Remote Sensing, for sustainability communication
📚 Innovative sustainability education
🌱 Mapping SDGs, environmental justice, and island ecosystems
Tuesday, the workshop participants gathered in the beautiful Aula at the University of Aruba. In addition to the speakers mentioned below (both international and local), interested audience members from Aruba included Nathalie Maduro Director, and Facundo Franken, Policy Advisor, both of the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries (Santa Rosa) Aruba, as well as Sietske van der Wal from the Aruba Conservation Foundation (ACF). Students and colleagues from Utrecht University Global Sustainability Science Bachelor program and from the University of Aruba were also in attendance, and a few more familiar faces.
The event opened with welcoming remarks from Sue-Ann Lee, Rector of the University of Aruba. In her welcoming opening remarks, she accentuated the importance of international collaboration, the role of universities in advancing sustainability, and the growing relevance of cartography for addressing complex social and environmental challenges, particularly in island contexts.
Britta Ricker, Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, Chair of the ICA Commission on Cartography and Sustainable Development (co-organizer of the workshop), emphasized the importance of global–local collaboration and the unique role islands play as living laboratories for sustainability innovation. She also described leverage points in sustainability and how cartography can and should play a pivotal role. Additionally, she reminded cartographers to reflect on representation on maps, to reflect and consider the local context.
Georg Gartner, President of the International Cartographic Association and Professor at TU Wien, delivered a passionate keynote on the role of cartography in sustainable development. He highlighted how maps and geospatial thinking help translate complex data into actionable insights, supporting decision-making across environmental, social, and economic domains.
The morning keynote session continued with Eric Mijts from the University of Aruba, who introduced initiatives focused on developing sustainable island solutions through education, research, and applied consultancy projects. He emphasized valuable educational advancements and institution building at the University of Aruba, and highlighted the important research being done in the Sustainable Island Solutions through Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (SISSTEM) project at the University of Aruba. He also shared ideas from his new co-edited book, Turning the Tide: Climate Change, Social Change, and Islandness.
The session on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) resources showcased innovative tools and teaching approaches. Lily Houtman (Penn State University) introduced the QGIS Technical Supplement for Mapping for a Sustainable World, demonstrating how open-source tools can support sustainability-focused mapping. Robert Roth (University of Wisconsin–Madison) followed with an introduction to the Atlas of Sustainability, illustrating how cartography can drive real-world action.
Additional perspectives included Lorenzo De Simone from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who presented the UN Handbook on Remote Sensing for Agricultural Statistics and Mapping, and Sharona Jurgens (University of Aruba), who shared research on urbanization in the Dutch Caribbean. In her contribution, Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger (Clark University) shared her curriculum for her course that focuses on Geographic Information Science solutions for Sustainable Development. She showed how we can integrate creative thinking and problem-solving to advance the UN SDG agenda through cartography in our curricula. Carolyn Fish (University of Oregon and co-organizer of the workshop) explored how GIS education and data scale influence awareness of the SDGs and environmental justice.
In the afternoon, the focus shifted to sustainability innovations. Britta Ricker (Utrecht University) discussed spatial data challenges for small islands and exploratory visualizations related to SDG 15: Life on Land. She showcased her ongoing work with students, looking into how to define a forest for different SDG indicator reporting agencies from global to local decision-making and showing different examples of what it matters. You can view her interactive presentation here in this ESRI StoryMap Brief. Next was N.T. Nawshin (University of Wisconsin–Madison), who presented an inspiring locative audio cartography as a tool for sustainability education and the usability results thereof.
Maarten Eppinga (University of Zurich) examined mapping invasive plant species in the Caribbean using self-organizing mapping techniques and scrutinizing the results based on his local geographical knowledge of the place, while Anthony Sevold (University of Aruba and Metabolic Foundation) shared extensive examples and insights into island-scale coastal ecosystem monitoring and innovative sustainable development initiatives across the island. Jan Brus (Palacký University Olomouc) closed the session with lessons on communicating data quality in citizen science.
In the last session, Judith Stratmann presented on GIS4C, highlighting applied GIS tools for conservation. She shared in-depth information about the value of ArcGIS products for advanced science as well as the platforms they offer for data sharing within an organization and for the outside world. We saw a range of cloud-based solutions ideal for sharing interactive maps for the public to better understand sustainable pathways.
The event concluded with an enthralling closing keynote from Erik Houtepen of the CARMABI Foundation. His presentation, Mapping Our Islands, demonstrated how maps can tell stories about ecology. In his presentation, he guided the audience through the history, evolution, and experimentation with different nature management strategies on the island of Curaçao. He dazzled us with a showcase of old maps, vivid imagery of the island, so the audience could draw connections between the map and what was happening on the ground. He had conducted serious, deep map archival research to bring together this exciting presentation highlighting the value of maps for understanding ecological evolution. He used cartography and aerial photography to vividly show the results of different environmental management techniques and experimentation to achieve environmental sustainability. He used maps to support and clearly communicate his narrative to show the audience the evolution of ecology practices on the island. The presentation concluded with a lively round of questions and answers. We thank Erik Houtepen for his engaging and enlightening presentation.
Day 3: Meeting with the Aruba SDG Taskforce and Planning an Agenda
During the morning of day three, participants met with members of the Aruban Sustainable Development Goal Taskforce, including Gayle Arendsz policy advisor in Economic Policy and Research at the Department of Economic Affairs, Commerce and Industry for Aruba and Louisette Christiaans-Yarzagaray, Policy Advisor in Sustainable Development Planning at the Department of Economic Affairs, Commerce and Industry for Aruba.
This meeting was an opportunity to facilitate knowledge exchange between academia, government, and industry. Government employees informed us about exciting and innovative work being done by the government of Aruba. They are using cartography and GIS to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are internally working on methodologies to use cartography to address the UN SDGs and indicators more locally. They also shared that relevant practical applications could be useful to incorporate into teaching and opportunities for research collaborations. Infrastructural Government Agencies also have a GIS platform (gis.infra.aw) Ms Arendsz and Ms. Christiaans-Yarzagaray drew our attention to the Open SDG initiative in Aruba and CBS publications and the comprehensive SDG report. Together, we discussed how indicators could be improved and incorporate localized context. We discussed how geospatial data should be included in official SDG indicator metadata collection and curation. This would afford opportunities for more cartography to facilitate informed place-based decision-making.
In the afternoon, workshop participants, including Facundo Franken Policy Advisor for the Santa Rosa Department of Agriculture in Aruba, and speakers started sorting and outlining our ideas for a collaborative research agenda paper, coalescing and communicating all the exciting ideas shared during this three-day event.
Conclusion
Together, the event showcased how cartography connects global sustainability goals with local action. We shared resources for teaching and data sources, creative ideas, and lessons learned. The University of Aruba was the ideal place to hold this cartography and sustainable development workshop. By centering island perspectives, we learned even more about sustainability, necessary for mapmaking. These experiences help paint a local picture of sustainability issues that can be mapped. The workshop strengthened collaboration, shared practical tools, and highlighted the essential role of maps in shaping a more sustainable future. Now the real work begins – writing and continuing collaborative efforts for effective cartography for a sustainable world!
This figure below means “Our Culture” in Papiamento – one of the 3 official languages on the island. Thank you for sharing your culture with us, Aruba.