Tag Archives: cartography

Cartography and Sustainable Development Workshop in Aruba

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Monday Jan 26th- Wed Jan 28th 2026

University of Aruba

The First Cartography and Sustainable Development Workshop in Aruba
Dates: Monday, January 26 – Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Location: University of Aruba, Oranjestad, Aruba

Submit your abstract or lightening talk idea here by October 31, 2025

Invitation

Join us in Aruba for the First ICA Workshop on Cartography and Sustainable Development, This event brings together cartographers, local experts, sustainability experts, policymakers, to explore how maps can illuminate sustainability challenges and solutions—especially in small-island contexts.

This event is hosted by the University of Aruba, the International Cartographic Association,  ICA Commission of Cartography and Sustainable Development, UX Commission, Working Group on Participatory Mapping, Utrecht University, and GIS4C

This event will be held in the beautiful newly renovated Maria Convent at the University of Aruba.

Why Sustainable Development and Cartography?

Sustainable Development, defined in the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, is a global challenge requiring local solutions.

  • Cartography’s role: Maps are pivotal for recognizing global and local trends and identifying areas where interventions are needed.
  • Small-island focus: Islands like Aruba face magnified sustainability challenges due to size, limited resources, and geographic isolation. “Island metabolism” makes these challenges more visible—such as resource management, waste, and tourism impacts. Cartography can help identify and communicate these issues.
  • Our aim: To create a space for dialogue, knowledge exchange, and collaborative problem-solving through cartography.

Call for Presentations: Mapping for Sustainable Development

We invite contributions in three formats:

1. Extended Abstract (20 min presentation + 5 min discussion)

2. Lightning Talk (5 min presentation + 5 min discussion)

  • Up to 250 words
  • Research in progress, policy ideas, or technical demos

3. Poster Presentation

  • Student and research posters encouraged

Submission Timeline

  • Register your attendance here by: October 31, 2025
  • Submit abstracts by: October 18, 2025  October 31, 2025
  • Notification of acceptance will be sent to you no later than November 6th.
  • Accepted abstracts will be open access, published by the International Cartographic Association

Registration
Please sign up to register your attendance using this form. Submit your Extended Abstract, Lighting Talk, or Poster Presentation Here.

Workshop Program Highlights

Each day combines research sessions with field excursions. The workshop emphasizes sustainable tourism, supporting local restaurants, hotels, and operators.

  • Day 1 (Mon, Jan 26): Welcome, keynote, University of Aruba tour, Research talks, dinner at Surfside Restaurant
  • Day 2 (Tue, Jan 27): Island sustainability bus tour (with lunch), lightning talks, evening discussions
  • Day 3 (Wed, Jan 28): Sailing tour (optional, extra fee), World Café discussions, closing dinner

Featured activities include:

  • Guided island sustainability tour by Eric Mijts, Director of Research at the University of Aruba and Founding Director of SISSTEM
  • Welcome Lecture by the International Cartographic Association President Georg Gartner
  • Presentations by Aruba’s SDG Task Force, government officials, and NGOs
sneak peek of Eric’s island tour

Costs

Workshop + Day 2 tour: $100 USD (includes bus tour, lunch, coffee breaks)tour, bus tour and all coffee breaks)

Workshop only: $30 USD (includes coffee breaks) – student discounts available

Accommodation in Oranjestad

Participants are encouraged to book accommodations early, as January is a busy season in Aruba. Options include:

Hotels within or near Oranjestad:

  • Wonders Boutique Hotel: A small eco-friendly boutique hotel in a quiet neighborhood near Oranjestad.
  • Renaissance Wind Creek Aruba Resort (Downtown Oranjestad): A full-service resort with private island access, walking distance to the University of Aruba.
  • Talk of the Town Hotel & Beach Club: Mid-range option across from Surfside Beach, convenient to both the airport and downtown.

Budget-friendly guesthouses and apartments:

  • Airbnb and small guesthouses are widely available in Oranjestad and nearby neighborhoods.
  • Studio apartments and B&Bs provide affordable options for longer stays.

Palm Beach / Eagle Beach (15 min drive):
For those preferring a traditional beach resort setting, Hilton Aruba Caribbean Resort, Hyatt Regency Aruba, and Barcelo Aruba are available.

We look forward to your participation!

This workshop is both an academic and cultural exchange. Together, we will discuss, document, and reflect on how cartography can support sustainable development—and experience firsthand how Aruba is shaping its own sustainable future.

Thank you to our sponsors

Mangroves and baby Mangroves in Aruba – Mangroves are highly protected ecosystem as they provide erosion control, biodiversity and habitat for many different species, and they are an important carbon sink. Mangoves are linked to SDG 15.1.1 and SDG indicator 6.6.1
One of many beautiful murals in San Nicolas, Aruba which will be viewed on the island tourn on day 2.

ICA Workshop on Multiscale Cartography and Sustainability

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17th August, 2025 from 8:00 to 11:30 PST (UTC-8)

Vancouver, Canada (and possibly online)

The ICA Commissions on Cartography and Sustainable Development, and Multiscale Cartography, invite contributions to a joint workshop on the role of multiscale cartography in advancing sustainability. Together in this workshop we will explore how cartographic methods and data management can support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by addressing challenges across multiple spatial scales, emphasizing design, production, and data gaps. Special attention will be given to sustainability in terms of energy use and computational efficiency, following recent advancements in green cartography.

Sustainable development seeks to meet present needs without compromising future generations (United Nations). To achieve global SDGs, local action is essential. Mapping at multiple scales is key for localizing global objectives, coordinating actions, and addressing complex sustainability challenges.

The workshop will focus on the intersection of multiscale cartography, sustainability, and data quality, highlighting advancements in AI-driven techniques for generalization and automated quality assessments for both original and generalized data. As geospatial data grows in volume and resolution, developing robust methods to ensure accuracy and fitness for use remains a priority.

We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

  • Cartographic generalization for sustainability and SDGs
  • Mapping service accessibility and data gaps
  • Green cartography and energy-efficient mapping
  • Development and dissemination of multiscale data for sustainability
  • Quality assessment techniques for generalized geospatial data
  • Addressing the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP)
  • AI/ML applications in map generalization and sustainability

Program

To be announced…based on your submissions 🙂

Registration

Registration is done via the ICC conference registration system. Please visit the ICC 2025 website

If you only plan to attend online, you just need to use the link above, no need for registration.

Submissions

You are invited to submit a 2-page paper, on ongoing research or position papers, following the general guidelines of the ICA conference abstracts.

The proceedings of the workshop will be published online with the CC-BY licence, on this page. Papers should be submitted to EasyChair.

As the workshop promotes open science, we strongly encourage that the datasets used in the presented research are made available, as well as the code. The code can be deposited in a platform such as Github, while the datasets can be uploaded to Zenodo.org or similar repositories, and the DOI should be mentioned in the paper.

The proceedings will be published openly on this website (CC-BY licence).

The workshop will be open to researchers and practitioners interested in cartography for sustainability, map generalisation and multiple representation, regardless of submission or acceptance of an abstract.

Important dates

  • Submission deadline: 15th April 2025, submitted to EasyChair.
  • Notification of acceptance: by 9th May, 2025
  • Workshop: Sunday, 17th August, 2025

Organizing and Scientific Committee

  • Carolyn Fish, University of Oregon, USA
  • Izabela Karsznia, University of Warsaw, Poland
  • Nicolas Regnauld, Esri, France
  • Britta Ricker, Utrecht University, Netherlands
  • Timofey Samsonov, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
  • Lawrence V. Stanislawski, USGS, USA
  • Guillaume Touya, LASTIG, IGN-ENSG, Univ. Gustave Eiffel, France.

Commission work shared at two invited UN presentations – available to view online

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At the United Nations Datathon Training Webinar: Integration of Geospatial Information and Statistics for the SDGs in the context of Big Data held on Oct 4, 2023 Hosted by UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Statistics Division – ICA Cartography and Sustainable Development Commission Chair, Britta Ricker was invited to present her talk titled  “Understanding, analyzing and visualizing big data: A geospatial approach for the SDGs” you may watch the full presentation here.

The IAEG-SDGs Working Group on Geospatial Information: Rescuing the SDGs with Geospatial Information hosted by the Working Group on Geospatial Information (WGGI) of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) This event titled: Rescuing the SDGs with Geospatial Information UN55SC was held on February 19, 2024.Britta Ricker was Invited to Present Commission work in her talk titled “How can… or how does academia help with the SDG indicators? Academic research for sustainable development” Watch Dr. Ricker talk here This event was formally hosted by United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN GGIM), and well organized by Mark Iliffe.

The event was chaired by Ms Mary Smyth, Central Statistics Office, Ireland and is the co-Chair IAEG-SDGs WGGI. Other presenters in this seminar included: Mr Olav Eggers, Agency for Data Supply and Infrastructure, Denmark talk titled: National geospatial information for supporting the SDGs and Mr David Borges, Committee on Earth Observations Satellites (CEOS) and NASA , USA with his talked titled: Global data, national progress, local impact

Read more about the event here The IAEG-SDGs Working Group on Geospatial Information: Rescuing the SDGs with Geospatial Information (un.org)

Call for Papers: International Journal of Cartography

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Special Issue – Cartography and Sustainable Development

Guest Editors: Britta Ricker and Carolyn Fish

The International Cartographic Association’s Commission of Cartography and Sustainable Development invites submissions for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Cartography, published by Taylor and Francis. (http://www.tandfonline.com/tica)

The aim of the Journal is to provide a vehicle for publishing key documents from all areas of the ICA research, teaching and professional community’s expertise, and in so doing, to define contemporary cartography and GIScience. The Journal covers a number of areas of endeavour in cartography and GIScience, both traditional and transitional.

Access to resources necessary to sustain life are not accessible to all. The reasons for this are complex and interwoven. Sustainable Development is the process of meeting the necessities of the present without compromising the opportunities of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable Development is an inherently interdisciplinary challenge and addresses issues of environmental, social, and economic justice and equity. It requires changes to current understandings of development to improve human wellbeing through environmental preservation, and social equity, and economic opportunity and development. Cartography can help reduce complexity by illustrating both current realities and future possibilities to reveal spatial patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Maps and cartographic visualizations can aid in identifying where to employ local solutions to global challenges, indicating where opportunities could be had, illuminating injustice, and guiding informed decision-making processes more broadly. Well-designed maps employing effective cartographic principles can illuminate strategies to reach a sustainable world.

We invite paper submissions that provide pragmatic, conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical basis for supporting and advancing Sustainable Development initiatives through cartography and/or geovisualization. We welcome a wide range of topical issues that address sustainable development including (but are not limited to):

  • The use or modification of maps to advance ecological, social, or economic opportunity, development, and/or justice
  • How cartography is an effective tool to illuminate gaps, where sustainable development initiatives are needed
  • How visualizations can be employed to reify or evaluate challenges associated with Sustainable Development
  • Identifying solutions or challenges faced at different (spatial and administrative) scales (or levels of geography and government) in terms of specific variables related to Sustainable Development
  • Addressing Sustainable Development as it related to cartographic design, production and data management
  • Communicating missing data that could advance Sustainable Development action
  • Exploring issues of scale (either geographic or temporal) in Sustainable Development and cartography
  • Investigating the application of participatory approaches to Sustainable Development and cartography
  • Mapping the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Timeline:

September 8th, 2023 – Authors Submit Title and short abstract (100-200 words max) (send these expressions of interest to Guest Editors Britta Ricker b.a.ricker@uu.nl and Carolyn Fish cfish11@uoregon.edu) 

September 15th, 2023 – Notification of selected submissions an invitation to submit a full paper

December 15th, 2023 – Full papers due

All submissions and reviewing for papers submitted to the International Journal of Cartography are handled electronically through the Taylor and Francis on-line facility.  This manages the paper-handling process – from submission, to review and revision to publishing.  All papers are double-blind reviewed.

As soon as papers are accepted, typeset, and approved by the author they are published on-line (and article DOI provided).  This speeds-up the time taken from paper acceptance to publishing.  Once all papers for a particular issue are in-hand the print version of the Journal is published. All papers are published with abstracts in English and French.  Additionally, at the authors’ request, and if the author provides the abstract in their mother tongue, it is possible to include a third abstract, in the Authors’ mother tongue.

Contact:

Please contact Britta Ricker b.a.ricker@uu.nl and/or Carolyn Fish cfish11@uoregon.edu  with any questions and with submissions to the Special Issue

Welcome to the Cartography and Sustainable Development (ICA) Commission Website

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Welcome to the International Cartographic Association‘s Commission for Cartography and Sustainable Development website. Here you will find information about our commission, current opportunities, past events, and learning materials.

Please click this link to sign up to be on our mailing list.