GeoARIA-Africa: A Novel Integrative Framework Crossing Geospatial Data, Information Technologies, Environment and Nature for the Analysis and Management of Environmental Risks on the African Continent
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22821134Palavras-chave:
environmental risks, geospatial data, information technology, environment and nature, Africa, Angola, risk management, conceptual innovationResumo
The African continent faces an unprecedented intensification of environmental risks — droughts, floods, erosion, wildfires, ecosystem degradation and technological accidents linked to extractive industries — amid institutional fragility, data scarcity and rapid digital transformation. African scientific literature has produced valuable yet fragmented studies: GIS applications to specific hazards, geospatially-enabled governance frameworks and reflections on information technologies, but no work has systematically and conceptually crossed the four domains geospatial data, information technology, environment and nature, and environmental risk analysis into a single continental-scale theoretical-operational framework. Authored at Universidade Gregório Semedo (Angola), this article presents GeoARIA-Africa, the first African conceptual framework to perform such integration. The methodology combines an exploratory-systematic literature review (corpus of 36 studies) with an original domain-convergence method, which confirmed the gap and grounded the framework's principles, its five-layer architecture and its mathematical formalization — including the Composite Geo-environmental Risk Index (ICRG). Prospective applications to Angolan scenarios (southern droughts, the Kwanza and Cuango basins, extractive industries) and continental scalability are discussed, aligned with the Sendai Framework, the Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union's Agenda 2063; a step-by-step replication protocol and an illustrative ICRG calculation are provided. Contributions are theoretical (a novel interdisciplinary conceptual synthesis), methodological (a replicable domain-crossing protocol) and practical (an implementation roadmap for environmental risk governance in Africa).
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