Quantum Leap in Cartography as a requirement of Sustainable Development of the World

Abstract. Sustainable development is one of the most important challenges for humanity and one of the priorities of the United Nations. Achieving sustainability of the whole World is a main goal of management at all levels – from personal to local to global. Therefore, decision making should be supported by relevant geospatial information system. Nevertheless, classical geospatial products, maps and GIS, violate fundamental demand of ‘situational awareness’ concept, well-known philosophy of decision-making – same representation of situation within a same volume of time and space for all decision-makers. Basic mapping principles like generalization and projections split the universal single model of situation on number of different separate and inconsistent replicas. It leads to wrong understanding of situation and, after all – to incorrect decisions. In another words, quality of the sustainable development depends on effective decision-making support based on universal global scale-independent and projection-independent model. This new way for interacting with geospatial information is a quantum leap in cartography method. It is implemented in the so-called ‘Digital Earth’ paradigm and geospatial services like Google Earth. Com-paring of both methods, as well as possibilities of implementation of Digital Earth in the sustain-able development activities, are discussed.