Geography Careers in the Public Sector

Geographers are employed across a wide variety of public sector jobs, from state and local governments to the highest levels of federal agencies. Geographers working for city, county, or state governments develop careers as waste and pollution managers, urban and regional planners, cartographers, and GIS coordinators. In the federal government, geographers are employed in positions ranging from conservationists and census specialists to managers and executives.

A significant number of geographers obtain employment in GIScience, remote sensing, and cartography positions, but geomorphologists trained in watershed analysis, climatologists skilled in regional and global climate change, medical geographers proficient in public health management, and biogeographers knowledgeable about ecosystem processes and deforestation – among many others – are also needed.

Geographers in State and Local Government

Geographers are involved in a variety of state and local government organizations and departments that focus on, but are not limited to:

• Transportation
• Health
• Environmental planning, monitoring, and remediation
• Metropolitan or rural planning
• Economic development

However, state and local governments do not have a common organizational structure. Some local governments may have certain functions that others lack, and functions found within one city may not exist elsewhere, or may be subsumed by county, regional, or state agencies. Some of the most common areas where geographers find work in state and local governments include:

►Transportation agencies and authorities. Typically, these organizations will use demographic data to create maps to determine where to place transit routes, or how to alleviate congestion where vehicle counts are high. They may also utilize base maps or census demographic maps provided by other government agencies. Many agencies will have their own schedulers and planners, but may rely on geographers for information on higher level planning decisions. They vary in sophistication from smaller rural systems to larger countywide or regional systems. Smaller systems will often seek technical assistance from geographers at the county or state level.

►Health agencies. Geographers in health agencies often map localization or concentration of health issues, such as asthma hospitalization rates, “cancer clusters,” or other environmental health data across a geographic area. Geographers working in public health departments of state and local governments often have backgrounds in human geography, using their skills to understand the interrelations between human activity and the physical environment.

►Environmental agencies. Managing of environmental quality has become a more prevalent function of state and local governments in recent decades. Many states, in an effort to make natural resource protection more efficient by consolidating environmental programs, have formed state environmental agencies that employ geographers. Like their counterparts in federal environmental agencies, geographers at the state level and local levels contribute to a wide range of projects from restoring ecosystems and habitats for endangered species, to monitoring droughts and water resources, to modeling the impacts of climate change on state and local resources.

►Metropolitan or rural planning departments. Urban planning helps communities envision their future and find a balance between new development, environmental conservation, and innovative change. Geographers contribute to this mission by engaging in environmental planning, land use planning, and demographic analysis, where they are often focused on developing models and working with GIS. This information may be integrated into transportation and environmental planning functions to better understand the current environment and where changes may occur in the future.

►Economic development agencies. These agencies seek to attract new firms and promote existing businesses, and will often use GIS to understand how local economic development issues, laws, and policies affect businesses. In many cases, there are restrictions on building in historic preservation districts, wetlands, or similarly regulated areas. Civil servant geographers might be tasked with creating maps or analyses of demographic data, access to highways, or the availability of transit.

►GIS departments. Some state and local governments have established departments focused on GIS as a means of developing data and mapping systems for use by public agencies or the public in general. Although the basic capabilities of GIS software may be used across a variety of departments, centralized teams with GIS expertise are now common in many government work environments. These teams focus on tasks such as developing large-scale geographic data, analytical models, and interactive GIS applications that are user-friendly and accessible to the general public. They often support the needs of multiple programs within a department or entire agencies.

Profiles of Geographers in State and Local Government

Geographers in the Federal Government

The U.S. federal government is a large and growing user of geospatial information. Within the federal government, many geographers are employed as scientists, researchers, administrators, resource planners, policy analysts, project managers, technical specialists, and a host of other positions across a wide variety of agencies. The federal government has numerous, varied, and a constantly growing number of geography-related positions due to the expanding need for geographic expertise and analysis. Even in an era of declining government budgets, there are likely to be many outstanding opportunities for geographers in the coming years as geography plays an increasingly central role in informing efforts by agencies at all levels of the federal government.

A desire to contribute or “give back” to one’s country is an important motive for a career in the federal government. Equally important for many geographers are the unique intellectual, scientific, and personal opportunities presented by working at the federal level. Geographers are involved in developing management plans for national parks, forests, wilderness areas, wetlands, and waterways. They work at agencies such as NASA and NOAA designing, launching and using scientific data from world-class satellite remote sensing instruments to examine weather and climate change around the world. They provide robust evidence for policy-making at the U.S. Census Bureau, and help plan for and mitigate the impact of disasters in the field of emergency management. These jobs present opportunities at scales that might never be available in the private sector, or at the state and local level. Some of the most common areas where geographers find work in the federal government include:

►Healthcare. In recent years the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has become increasingly reliant on GIS and geographic analysis. Within agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), geographers provide key contributions studying and analyzing infectious-disease outbreaks, the spread of global pandemics, or discrepancies in health outcomes for rural and urban communities facing similar underlying disease conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the importance and critical contributions of geographers in helping to inform the public about the virus’s spread. In the coming years geographers and GIS experts will increasingly be called upon for these critical tasks.

►Foreign Policy. Geographers are employed widely throughout foreign policy-oriented federal departments and agencies including the State Department, Department of Defense, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), intelligence branches within each of the armed services, and intelligence units within other executive departments such as the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security. Within these agencies geographers play critical roles that help shape foreign policy considerations, from providing maps that reflect the foreign policy standards and agreements of the federal government, to presenting information on the social and humanitarian context of maps and satellite images, to overseas deployments related to the diplomatic priorities of the State Department, to the surveillance and imagery expertise needed for critical military decision making, to providing cultural knowledge such as foreign language and foreign area expertise. The work of human geographers can involve the most sensitive and critical aspects of national security and provide exciting and unique challenges.

►Environmental Protection. Federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and others employ geographers to help solve problems ranging from climate change, to water resource management, to habitat restoration for endangered species, to the analysis of commercial fishing patterns. Using their expertise in geospatial analysis and GIS, geographers within these agencies are able solve problems at a variety of spatial scales and contexts and often contribute vital information central to their agencies’ missions.

►Emergency Management. In an increasingly interconnected world, innovative solutions are required to deal with local, regional, national, and global emergencies ranging from severe weather occurrences, to economic crises, to pandemic events. Federal agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Department of Homeland Security develop national policy and build capacity to prepare, respond, and recover from critical incidents. Within these agencies, geographers contribute to the emergency management field in numerous ways, from mapping hazards and developing notification systems, to disaster mitigation, to detecting oil spills or other human-environmental hazards.

►Resource Management. Federal agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) employ significant numbers of geographers, where they help lay the groundwork for significant policy and regulatory actions. USGS geographers have, for example, provided critical research on the earth’s climate and the related topics of global change and species migrations that have directly contributed to decisions related to U.S. climate change policy. The research of geographers has advanced the use of ecosystem services and related science in conservation, restoration, resource management, and development decisions.

►Transportation. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) often relies on geographers and GIS experts for analyzing federal road projects, highway safety, or heavily traveled aviation routes. Geographers provide key geospatial insights that help inform the planning of new public transportation infrastructure such as interstate highways, bridges, railroads, airports, maritime and waterway routes, and public transit systems. Geographers working at agencies such as the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) provide key geospatial metrics ranging from federal freight transportation data and commodity flows, to commercial aviation data, to modeling the effects of increased fuel efficiency standards for commercial and private automobiles.

In addition to those detailed above, there are many other federal agencies, laboratories, and research centers that employ geographers, such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, an applied science and technology research center in Tennessee; the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado; the National Park Service; and the U.S. Forest Service. The U.S. Census Bureau is perhaps the largest employer of professional geographers in the federal government. Many geographers work within the Bureau’s Geography Division, which works with state and local governments to identify boundary changes and groups Census data into units known as Census Tracts, Block Groups, Blocks, and Census-Designated Places. These groupings are a key part of federal, state, and local efforts to divide and allocate billions of dollars in federal funding for vast numbers of programs. Population data developed by the Geography Division is also critical to state efforts to determine congressional and state-level legislative districts.

Profiles of Geographers in the Federal Government

Video Interviews with Public Sector Geographers