The Surveyor's Role in Monitoring, Mitigating, and Adapting to Climate Change, FIG Publication No. 65

The surveyor is a practical, pragmatic, people-centric professional person, skilled in spatial measurement, able to represent, interpret and analyse spatial information, highly knowledgeable in the administration and governance of rights to the land and sea, and capable of planning for the development and use of land resources. It is this unique combination of skills that allows the surveyor to not only collect and analyse data vital to understanding the impacts of climate change, but also to grasp many of the complex human, political and physical interactions that arise in dealing with climate change issues. Understanding the full extent of the complex interactions that are part of climate change science requires not just ad hoc monitoring of the earth, but rather integrated earth measurement and monitoring systems, many of which are satellite based. These data include radar altimetry, gravity, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), as well as sensors that use reflected or back-scattered sunlight as their radiation source. Such data can be used not only to provide detailed information about the terrain, land use patterns, water storage, ice mass balance and a host of other useful inputs which, when used together, provide a detailed picture of earth system change, but also to assist with emergency response and recovery operations after natural disasters. However, in order for this data to be correctly interpreted and integrated, it is essential that it not only be time tagged but also given well defined coordinates in a known reference system. Surveyors not only help define these coordinates and the reference systems that produce them but also help design and use the software tools that support the subsequent analyses of the resulting spatial data.