GIS can be a very important tool in decision making for sustainable development, because GIS can provide decision makers with useful information by means of analysis and assessment of spatial database as shown in Figure 1.8.
Decision making including policy making, planning and management can be interactively implemented taking into consideration human driving forces through public consensus. Driving forces include population growth, health and wealth, technology, politics, economics etc. by which human society will set up targets and goals on how to improve the quality of life.
Thus human driving forces, the key elements of human dimensions, will give impacts on the environment such as development of natural resources, urbanization, industrializations, construction, energy consumption etc. These human impacts will accordingly induce environmental changes such as land use change, change of life style, land degradation, pollution, climate change etc. Such environmental change should be timely monitored to increase public awareness. Remote sensing can be very useful for better understanding of relationship between human impacts and the environmental change as well as for building databases.
Physical dimensions monitored by remote sensing can be fed back to human dimensions through analysis and assessment by GIS in order to support better decision. In this sense, remote sensing should be integrated with GIS.