Learning Center for Advancing Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability in the Mexican State of Jalisco

Abstract

This paper addresses the need and opportunity for creating a learning center for advancing the monitoring and assessment of ecosystems resources and their sustainability in the Mexican state of Jalisco. It is an initiative that responds to the growing needs of a more sophisticated world in which knowledge is the tool for creating social and environmental progress and information is the key that unleashes this power. One of the goals of governments in this “Knowledge Age Era” is to create an environment in which ecosystem resources can be managed and utilized in a fashion that simultaneously allows societies to meet their needs, economies to grow, and the ecosystem resources to be sustained for future generations. It is among the most pressing demands of science and technology in the 21st century. The main actors and players of these evolving processes advocate the empowerment of people to make management and utilization decisions as the most rational approach to achieving profitable and sustainable ecosystems. However, to do this, a drastic change to information- and knowledge-based technologies will be needed as the new paradigm will have to be adopted on a large scale. At the heart of these transformations is the generation of data, information, and synthesis based on geospatially explicit frameworks that are scientifically credible and technically defensible. Key strategic components of this initiative are discussed in this paper.

Parent Publication

• Monitoring Science and Technology Symposium: Unifying Knowledge for Sustainability in the Western Hemisphere

Citation

Aguirre-Bravo, Celedonio; Schreuder, Hans. 2006. Learning Center for Advancing Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability in the Mexican State of Jalisco. In: Aguirre-Bravo, C.; Pellicane, Patrick J.; Burns, Denver P.; and Draggan, Sidney, Eds. 2006. Monitoring Science and Technology Symposium: Unifying Knowledge for Sustainability in the Western Hemisphere Proceedings RMRS-P-42CD. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. p. 755-760