Yearly Archives: 2011
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
Open Access Week 2011
The Open Access Week goes into its fifth year in 2011, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It takes place from October 24 to 30 in many places around the globe.
“This year, programs highlighting publishing and rights management choices for faculty authors, use of new media, and opportunities created by re-mixing and re-using scholarly materials are on tap. Open Educational Resources are another key topic, as is open-source technology” (see more details in the 2011 announcement).
In collaboration with SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), who are the organisers of the event, I have created an updated map of this year’s activities around the world. It connects to the map that we created last year for the 2010 event. The map shows a picture of the world according to the number of planned activities to be organised by country along forthcoming Open Access Week. Comparing this picture to last year, it can be seen that the participation in the event is slowly changing and very similar to last year. Comparing this picture to the proportion of scientific papers produced in the world (as shown on worldmapper), this picture can be seen as a welcoming trend for a higher awareness for free accessibility of the knowledge that is produced in the wealthier world. The importance of Open Access in the poorer parts of the world, as reflected in next week’s OA2011 activities in India and parts of Africa, are as important as the awareness for Open Access in general, as this can help to make research from those countries visible and accessible in a wider context (read more about this topic in Pablo de Castro’s contribution in the BioMed Blog).
Fair Play
The recent protests over the economic crisis gained wider attention with the Occupy Wall Street movement and sparked similar actions across the globe over the weekend. Besides a critique of the financial institutions and the banking sector, the demonstrations are also an expression of the uncertain living conditions that many people feel exposed to in an economically bleak time. They are also a reflection of the growing gaps within the societies of the wealthier world, where the poorest and richest parts of the society increasingly drift apart. This is a trend that the protesters see as unfair and problematic.
Fair Play is a new book which “brings together a selection of highly influential writings [that] look at inequality and social justice, why they matter and what they are. […] ‘Fair Play’ provides evidence that Britain is becoming more politically, socially and economically divided whilst coming together in terms of educational outcomes and reduced segregation by ethnicity” (see more information on the book website). Continue reading
The Human Shape of Germany
Maps of Germany’s population have become a regular feature on this website, starting with the first version of a topographical display of the gridded population cartogram of the country in 2009 to the more detailed analysis of population densities and demographic trends at the 20th anniversary of the reunification last year. One year on, as one of the economic strongholds Germany is in the spotlight of the financial turmoil in the Eurozone. When following the populist media, Germany’s population itself appears to be more unified than ever, at least in the question of the euro bailout.
Putting politics aside, it’s time to look at the German population once again.
The Pearl River Delta: A City of Cities
Earlier this year the British Telegraph Newspaper published a story about the creation of a new megacity in the Chinese Pearl River delta region. “China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million”, the opener of their story stated. The region mentioned here is an area covering the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Donggaun, Foshan, Huizhou, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Zhongshan and Zhuhai (as described in the China Urban Development Blog). The story was quickly picked up by many news sources back then, while Chinese officials were quick to deny the reports. Stories like this show, how urbanisation and megacities have become a buzz word, and are used especially in relation to the emerging economies in Asia in order to picture these – for western-centric eyes unbelievably – large and still growing populations in the most urbanised regions on the planet. A few thoughts on the relevance of megacities in their global context have been published on this website before (related to the map of the world’s megacities).
With special regard to the Telegraph story I have drawn another map showing the population distribution of China (based on 2010 Data from the Chinese Census and from estimates of SEDAC’s GPW database) and highlighted the Pearl River Delta region in this map. The equal-population map shows a gridded population cartogram in which every grid cell is resized according to the total number of people living there. This map makes the plans of a more integrated Pearl River Delta region more understandable, and perhaps slightly less exciting for those who interpreted the news as the creation of a new megacity, rather than the logical step in connecting an already populous region.
