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A Map Is Not Neutral: Putting CARE Into Community GIS

Written by Amaterra
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GIS can make community knowledge legible to decision-makers. It must not make that knowledge easier to extract.

Maps can help communities document water sources, track restoration, make land-use proposals and communicate with agencies on more equal terms. Satellite imagery and mobile data collection can add valuable evidence.

Yet every map also answers a difficult question: who gets to see, copy, interpret and act on the information?

For Indigenous territories and culturally sensitive places, “open” data can create risk. A public layer may expose sacred sites, medicinal plants, hunting grounds or routes to unwanted scrutiny and commercial use. A technically elegant map can still be unjust if it transfers control away from the people whose knowledge made it possible.

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance offer a practical starting point: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. In a community GIS project, that means agreeing data rules before collection; separating public, community-only and restricted layers; naming community decision-makers; documenting consent; and budgeting for local skills, hardware and long-term stewardship. It also means returning useful maps in forms the community chooses. The point is not simply to put more places on a platform. It is to strengthen the ability of communities to govern their territories on their own terms.

CARE and GIS also invite humility from researchers and NGOs. A point on a map is never the whole story of a place. It cannot contain every relationship, seasonal variation, spiritual meaning or disagreement. Maps should therefore travel with explanation: community narratives, agreed limits, attribution chosen by contributors and a route for correction or withdrawal. When used this way, mapping can strengthen a community’s voice in planning.

When used carelessly, it can convert living knowledge into a resource for others. The difference lies in who controls the process and who benefits from the result.

Technical choices follow from those decisions. Can the map be updated offline? Who has the passwords and copies of the files? Is the data stored on a service governed by terms the community understands? Can local trainees edit the layers without depending indefinitely on outside consultants?

We believe that a project with expensive equipment and no maintenance plan may be less useful than a simple system that local coordinators can sustain. The aim is not to create a perfect dataset. It is to create information that is accurate enough, safe enough and useful enough for the decisions that matter.

A useful community GIS process begins with a question, not a platform. A community may want to document flood paths before a road project, identify restoration priorities, show customary use of a landscape, or prepare for a dialogue with a public agency. Each purpose calls for different information and different safeguards. The group should decide early which layers can be public, which are for community use only, and which should not be digitized at all. It should be possible to say no to a data request without losing access to partnership or funding.

Biodiversity,

When Nature Became the Headline: What the Global Biodiversity Assessment Asked of Us

Written by Amaterra
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The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment brought the scale of nature loss into public view. Its deeper challenge was to change the systems that make loss feel normal.

In May 2019, the IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services gave the world a sentence that travelled everywhere: around one million species were threatened with extinction, many within decades. The number was shocking, but the report was not simply a catalogue of loss. It was the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, bringing together evidence on ecosystems, species, the benefits nature provides to people, and the direct and indirect drivers of decline. Its central message was that nature was declining at rates unprecedented in human history, and that incremental fixes would not be enough.

For conservation organizations, the report posed a difficult but necessary question. If decades of protected areas, species programs, environmental laws and public education had not halted the overall decline, what was missing? The answer was not that these efforts were pointless. Many have saved places, species and livelihoods. The answer was that conservation cannot be isolated from the ways food is produced, energy is generated, cities expand, goods are traded and power is distributed. Biodiversity is not an optional sector beside the economy. It is the living foundation beneath it.

The assessment identified five direct drivers of biodiversity loss: changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species. Behind those drivers sit systems of production and consumption, governance, incentives and values. That framing matters because it moves the conversation away from blaming individual communities for environmental decline. A smallholder farmer, a coastal fisher or a pastoral family often has little control over the market, policy or historical pressures shaping their choices. Conservation that ignores these conditions can become punitive, asking those with the least power to carry the greatest burden.

The report also made a stronger case for recognizing Indigenous Peoples and local communities as part of the answer. Across the world, communities have developed practices of care, rules of access, seasonal knowledge and collective institutions that help sustain biodiversity. Recognition should not be reduced to a photograph in a report or a brief consultation. It means respect for rights to lands, waters and resources; meaningful participation in decision-making; and support for community-led conservation on terms set by the people involved. It also means accepting that some knowledge is sensitive and should not be extracted for public databases or commercial use.

This is where the language of transformative change becomes useful. Transformation does not mean every place needs an identical new model. It means questioning the assumptions that produce repeated harm: that economic growth can be separated from ecological limits; that conservation is best achieved by excluding people; that data belongs automatically to the institution that collects it; or that the value of a forest can be captured only through timber, carbon or tourism. Transformation may look like secure tenure, a community seed bank, a restored watershed, a procurement policy that rewards sustainable production, or a planning process in which residents have real power.

The public response to the 2019 assessment was understandably anxious. Yet anxiety alone is not a strategy. The useful response is to connect the global warning to places where people can act together. Protect and restore habitat, certainly. But also support local food diversity, reduce damaging incentives, strengthen public environmental institutions and defend the people who speak up for land and water. Ask whether conservation projects improve both biodiversity and community security. Ask whether monitoring can reveal harm as well as success. The report did not ask us merely to care more about nature. It asked us to reorganize the relationship between nature, power and everyday life.

The lasting value of the 2019 assessment is its refusal to let conservation remain marginal. It requires funders, governments, businesses and civil society to examine the assumptions behind decisions that appear unrelated to nature. It also gives local organizations a clear mandate to ask more of every project: is it reducing pressure or merely moving it? Does it recognize existing stewardship? Does it strengthen community control of data and land? These questions translate a global assessment into an everyday practice of accountability.

The report also helped clarify why stories matter. Statistics can reveal the scale of decline, but people act when they can connect those numbers to the places that sustain them: a pollinator in a garden, a wetland that filters water, a forest that supplies food and medicine, a coastline that shelters a community. Good environmental communication should make those connections without oversimplifying them. It should show that biodiversity is not a luxury for distant reserves. It is the web of relationships that makes farms productive, water cycles reliable and cultures rooted in place.

Biodiversity