Economic impact of geospatial services in Australia (2024)

The study has sought to capture some of the various societal benefits from the day-to-day use of geospatial information, such as tackling climate change, environmental management, sustainability and emissions reduction monitoring, resilience planning, emergency and national disaster response and management, along with defence and security. As some of these impacts of geospatial can be difficult to quantify and monetize, these are articulated in a series of sector-based case studies that showcase how geospatial services add value across the Australian economy.

The case studies include:

• Emergency services – the Tasmanian State Emergency Services use a real-time satellite early warning system that results in much faster response times.
• Bathymetry (seabed mapping) – Port Hedland, a major iron ore port in Western Australia, uses a Hydroid (a model to better understand sea levels and depths of a particular area) to gain considerable improvements to the port’s productivity.
• Biosecurity – a Red Imported Fire Ants (RIFA) Eradication Program is being supported by geospatial information and artificial intelligence to reduce the spread of RIFA.
• Managing climate and natural resources – once established, a Shared Environmental Analytics Facility (SEAF) in Western Australia, would be an innovative data analytics facility to create a sustainable environmental value chain.
• Consumers – to reduce future traffic congestion from Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) governments in Australia are looking at the use of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) and the benefits of Satellite-Based Augmentation Systems (SBAS) signals which can improve the accuracy of vehicle positioning, enabling better demand management options such as real-time road pricing.
• Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSD) – the New South Wales FSD provides geospatial infrastructure of authoritative foundational spatial data to support government services and national collaboration.
• Land and project development – Victoria’s Digital Cadastre Modernisation (DCM) and Digital Transformation Program has helped to address a series of challenges to the existing cadastral mapping such as defining quality measures for output data, developing highly automated multistage processing, and delivering quality assurance verification into the production process.

Each case study highlights how industry make use of a range of geospatial services across sectors and deliver impact to a broad range of end-users and beneficiaries. The URL for the case study companion report which includes 65 sectoral examples is included in the references section.