Indicators, Modelling, and Visualization of Islands

Island Indicators And Criteria For Classification

Islands are all of sort of forms, shape, size and have diverse characteristics. Indicators could provide us understanding on the nature of islands and identify islands with particular characteristics. Measuring the isolation of an island from other human inhabited places, can give us an indication of isolation. Or measuring the percentage of the land area of an island above sea level can give us an indication of the risk of the sea level rise. Measuring the level of economic development and impact on the environment considering income per capita and gross domestic product can provide an indication of the wealth of the islands. However, there are no statistics to allow the calculations to be applied for islands.

The benchmarking study could be done based on the cluster methodology. For example let’s assume we have a group of seven islands with similar climatic conditions, but different socio-economic characteristics. First step is to analyse the socio-economic characteristics and organize them in a number of clusters. Let’s assume we end up with four clusters. In this case, the seven islands could belong to the same climatic cluster, but to the four different socio-economic clusters. The primary objective is to have the ability to design renewable energy systems for islands with similar conditions. Although islands have commonalities, when it comes to policy making, careful treat must be provided. The following list provides a template for classifying islands around the world to assist in policy making and planning (Sheldon, 2005):

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  Climate Characteristics (cold, temperate or tropical).

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  Proximity to the mainland, since islands that are more remote and distant are challenged to cope with their remoteness and they face complications in accessibility and connectivity

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  Size and impact on increase of number of tourisms during seasonal term

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  Proximity to other islands

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  The Governance of the island plays a role in the support of sustainable development plans. Depending on if the island is an autonomous state or they are part of larger countries and follow the same national or regional policies could impact future plans based on the applied national strategies.

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  Population levels/Economic Growth is significant in designing sustainable policies. Usually in such islands sustainable environmental practices in tourism can found prosperous ground even inside the local community while in larger islands centralized policies are required applicable to the different sub-sector of tourism

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  Homogeneity of the population and the socio-cultural sustainability of island goals affect the resilience of the locals to large tourism waves.

Islands Studies And Models

We have reviewed some of the existing energy models and which of them have been applied to islands. This section seeks to compile together the information (Table1). The list is not exhaustive.