The United Nations General Assembly declared 2011 as the International Year of Forests (IYF) to raise awareness on sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests. The British Prime Minister Cameron experienced, how forests can become a very political issue, which shows how emotional people’s attitude towards their environment can sometimes become. The International Year of Forests, however, was never mentioned in the debate that went on during the proposed forest sell-off by the British government, which highlights one of the problems that sometimes these proposed International-Years-of-Something face: A lack of attention. On a global scale, 31% of the land area is covered by forests. Some of these areas are highly under threat by unsustainable forestry and environmental pollution. The IYF therefore is meant to emphasise “the need for sustainable management of all types of forests, including fragile forest ecosystems” (UN resolution on the IYF). Continue reading
Category Archives: maps
Demographic Trends of Greater London 2001-2031
Demographic trends in the United Kingdom, such as these discussed in the report on Demographic Change and the Environment, show an ongoing population growth in the south-east of England. With London being the dominating city in the UK’s economy, this is little surprising, as key industries but also most key institutions are still located in the capital city. This is one major reason why the southeast is like a population magnet that will have to find strategies to cope with an increasing population if these conditions persist. Demographic trends do also predict a slowdown in population increase over the next decades, with an aging society and declining birth rates as they can already be observed in Germany or most Easter European countries. All trends include challenges for policy making and planning, which is why population projections play a key role for urban planners to face future challenges in their decision-making. The Greater London Authority as the key administrative body for the most populous area in the UK (see map) released such projections on borough level to the year 2031, including population estimates for the past years (see London Datastore) which I have used for some of my research recently. Following a series of population maps created from this data by Spatial Analysis I used this data to create a population cartogram animation for the 30 years covered by this data which shows the changing shares of the population within the boroughs of Greater London, including a colour code for the net migration (taking population change, births and deaths into account). This is how the London population trends look like: Continue reading
Broken Hearts
Here are two maps that I created in collaboration with the Department of Cardiovascular Science at the University of Sheffield using data published by the British Heart Foundation (see http://www.heartstats.org/ for more statistics). The maps is coloured by age-standardised cardiovascular heart disease death rates per 100,000 people (split into male and female deaths). Both maps are shaded using the quintiles, thus differ in the absolute rate shown here. This reveals a picture of the prevailing health inequalities in the United Kingdom, with a quite striking North-South divide on the one hand, and an existing division within the Capital as well (East London being most affected in the South East of England). Both maps are drawn on an equal population cartogram giving each person the same amount of space on the map: Continue reading
Winter 2010/11 and the Arctic Oscillation
British Views of the World 2010
2010 is over. An interesting year that has seen the advent of a big society in Britain, some exciting sports events (and with retaining the Ashes, even England made a last-minute win), a lot of snow, and many other things to remember (and to forget). This time of the year is review time. In map-ish terms, cartography and maps appear to become more and more popular again, not least because there are so many people out there taking on the new open data that keeps leaking (mostly on purpose, but sometimes by accident…). Therefore, a review of 2010 in maps is inevitable, and James Cheshire did so on his website which is well worth a look (even if that may be a little British-centric): 2010 mapped.
And here comes my final map for 2010: A look at the British view of the world in 2010. To understand how British people perceive the events on the globe, one can look at how frequently a country has been mentioned in major news stories. The following maps do exactly this by visualising the number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian (data derived from their Data store). Speaking of the Guardian, their website also features a nice interactive review-creator where you can create a personalised interactive review of this year – try it out if you feel that all other of the plenty reviews out there covered the wrong stories.
Here is the first map that also takes the domestic news stories from the United Kingdom into consideration – for obvious reasons the UK dominates this version of the map:
Britain in Snow
Another winter, another big freeze in the United Kingdom and Ireland: This winter has started early and brought the first significant snow cover to the British Isles at the beginning of December. Coming with a breeze of Arctic air from the North-East, the snow made its way down to the south of Great Britain, with Aqua satellite catching this moment at a time when some parts of the South-West still managed to escape the icing. This image from the NASA’s Earth Observatory shows the snow lingered in Great Britain and Ireland on December 8, 2010 with a few clouds over Northern Ireland and the South-East of England. To show the impact on the people living there, I reprojected the image using the gridded equal-population projection which transforms the picture according to the population distribution. Especially the snow-free areas in the South as well as in the Liverpool-Manchester region strike out in the population projection, showing that at this time the most severe affected areas were the less populated (what then was about to change, with the second cold spell bringing much more snow and ice to the more populated areas of the UK just in time for Christmas):
