Starting today the world gathers in Durban for the COP17 climate change summit. In times where economic growth is more anticipated than a decline in carbon emissions, the prospects for a successful successor to the Kyoto protocol (coming to an end in 2012) is quite unlikely, and it will be interesting to see, what ‘success’ the delegates have to announce for saving the world from mad and often also tragic consequences of changing climate patterns. Continue reading
Landmines
In a report released by the Landmine Monitor it is stated that landmine use is ‘highest since 2004’ despite record clearances. While with Burma (Myanmar), Israel, Lybia and Syria, four of the 20% of countries who did not sign an international treaty to stop the use of land mines, continued to use new devices this year (and further armed groups in countries such as Afghanistan, Colombia and Pakistan also laid new mines, as reported by the BBC), the deadly impact of these weapons reaches further than those countries. Continue reading
57 million deaths
People are dying all the time. Wars are just one of the many causes of death, but certainly one of the more avoidable ones. WHO’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is the key publication containing global health statistics which can help to understand the relevance of geography in relation to the mortality patterns and the prevalence of certain diseases. Continue reading
A Nuclear Planet
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is warning that “Iran appears to be on a structured path to building a nuclear weapon”. Are they…are they not? The possession of nuclear weapons is a well kept secret, also for those countries that are known to be part of the club of world nuclear forces. The Federation of American Scientists states that “the exact number of nuclear weapons in each country’s possession is a closely held national secret. Despite this limitation, however, publicly available information and occasional leaks make it possible to make best estimates about the size and composition of the national nuclear weapon stockpiles”. Using their data suggests, that there may be a total inventory of about 20,500 nuclear weapons that separates us from the vision of a nuclear-free world outlined by US President Obama in 2009 (meanwhile, priorities appear to have changed, with expert outlines for steps toward a nuclear-free world having been moved to an archive of the US foreign policy website). The reality looks very different, and Iran would only be one more member in a bipolar world that still very much reflects the nuclear arms race of the cold war. The following map is an update to the Worldmapper Nuclear Weapons cartogram using the 2011 estimates for the possession of nuclear weapons by the FAS:
Rediscovering the World
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Global Population Changes: From 2.5 to 10 billion in 150 years
The world’s population has reached the symbolic milestone of adding another billion to this planet. While 7 billion is a static number, the expansion and distribution of the world’s population is a very dynamic issue that a single map of where these 7 billion are living (as shown on this website back in July) does not do full justice of what is happening on the planet of people. A lot has changed from the 2.5 billion people that lived on the planet in the middle of the last century to today’s 7 billion, moving the gravitational centre of people considerably towards Asia. This has now started turning towards the African continent, which has not only been a considerable part of the global population growth over the last quarter of the century (and is therefore home to a large share of the world’s children), but is expected outnumber Asian population growth considerably in the decades to come.
The following cartogram-map animation shows these changing trends between 1950 and 2100. It is based on United Nations probabilistic population projections of total fertility from the 2010 Revision of the World Population Prospects. From the year 2010, the data is based on a future projection of expected population changed. “To project the population until 2100, the United Nations Population Division uses assumptions regarding future trends in fertility, mortality and international migration. Because future trends cannot be known with certainty, a number of projection variants are produced” (quoted from the WPP documentation). I used the data from the probabilistic median variant, in which the population is expected to grow to approximately 10 billion by the year 2100 (see below for a graph of the different scenarios produced by the UN). The animation therefore shows the changing distributions of population between the different countries (note that South Sudan is not included in the estimates; Sudan is therefore treated as one country in this map), with Europe losing large shares of population in total as well as in relation to the rest of the world, while the dominance of Asia slowly starts to be relativised by the increasing population shares on the African continent, making the changes in the Americas almost insignificant from a global perspective:
(click for larger map)
See also the (static) world population cartogram for this year