Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development, and Risk Management 20 Years Technical Committee on Environmental Informatics

Abstract

After its launch more than two decades ago, Environmental Informatics has become a somewhat fuzzy movement in applied informatics and computer science dealing with environmental matters to give rise to a professional society. Today, Environmental Informatics constitutes a scientific community with numerous tools, studies, publications, and resources of research. On the intellectual level, the GI TC 4.6 Environmental Informatics community with its academic background has a growing impact on government agendas, business applications in industry, and higher education programmes. As it has developed such a degree of institutionalisation, it is the right time to trace back its history (section 2), outline the current state of the field with its different forms of institutionalization (section 3), describe the emerging disciplinary contours (section 4), and illustrate major results and impacts of the field (section 5).