self-contained economies will have major environmental benefits, such as relieving urban areas 
of population and pollution pressures, producing consumer locating goods that cater to local 
markets and helping to diffuse environmental technologies. Information and communication 
technologies are said to offer new ways of working and make working home a possibility with 
consequent reduction in pollution. A frequent assumption is that such technologies are 
inherently benign and that they allow opportunities for substitution between commuting and 
teleworking (Clark 1993). Such technological change and a trend towards dispersed small 
scale businesses is argued to be somehow naturally more environmentally friendly than large 
business because dispersal is thought to involve local control. A more self-reliant set of local 
economies could emerge that combines local control with reduced environmental impact. This 
is the theory. However, the supposedly beneficial environmental consequences of recent trends 
in economic restructuring outlined by some scientists rest on a number of unsubstantiated 
assumptions (Gibbs 1996). As Gibbs states, the development of smaller scale and decentralised 
industry has been a major trend within the structure of industry in developed countries in 
recent years, this does not automatically mean independent small firms. Production may be 
decentralise, but the decentralisation of control and local autonomy may be limited. 
GIS: From data integration to a management perspective 
Sustainable Development is a concept for a process of change in which attitudes and 
behaviours are modified so that, in endeavours to meet needs, achieve aspirations and preserve 
options for future generations, individuals and communities will enhance and maintain their 
well-being. Sustainability reflects the long-term conditions of a system. GIS- and Remote 
Sensing-capabilities together cover a wide range of the needed monitoring and management 
task. As it will be argued later, achieving information, analysis, monitoring and management 
are highly related, but the state of the art of GIS progress is different. In natural resource 
management GIS is a cost-effective means of analysing data in support of e.g. forestry 
applications, notably timber yield estimations. Three operations are particularly significant in 
explaining this early interest in GIS applications for natural resource management: area 
measurement, superimposition and analysis of maps of different themes (e g. soils and forest 
types),and the generation of buffers of specified width around map features, such as streams. 
This means that data analysis often is complex and highly correlated with management tasks. 
There is much work on the international level of biodiversity and sustainable development 
especially since the Rio-conference. But there is a need for a specifically spatial approach to 
differentiate biodiversity and sustainability in practice. Because of limits to population and 
economy growth, accessible resources are limited spatially and finite quantitatively. This is also 
relevant to the obviously technically driven disciplines Geographic Information Science and 
Remote Sensing. General aims must be to maximise natural economic effectiveness and 
efficiency and attain and maintain a necessary balance among resource accessibility, 
requirements, and capacity to meet requirements. Specifically, we need rules for GIS and RS 
to consider qualitative aspects and to integrate qualitative and quantitative information. 
Complex environment, discrete representation 
The environment is infinitely complex, but must be represented digitally as a finite collection of 
discrete objects. Maps also represent the world as a finite collection of discrete features, and 
humans also discretise the world in order to describe it, learn and reason about it and navigate