Yearly Archives: 2011

World Water Day

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World Water Day 2011

Water is a basic requirement for all life, yet water resources are facing increasing demands from, and competition among, users. In 1992, the UN General Assembly designated 22 March of each year as the World Day for Water
(quoted from the WWD website).

Water is more than a chemical substance contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. Water has become a reason for conflicts and a controversial commodity, and yet, it is inevitable for every human being on the planet. The range of issues that are important when looking at water is diverse, and all fields reveal the global inequalities in access to clean water. One of these issues is the commercialisation of water, which on a global scale finds its manifestation in the bottled water industry: Bottled water is one way of getting access to clean water if there is no reliable central water supply or local source of water.
Edward Stanley from University College London looked at the bottled water business for a Geography dissertation project, for which I created some worldmapper maps visualising his data from that research on ‘Commodification and Mass Consumption – The Case for Bottled Water‘.
The topics that we mapped focus on the countries of origin of the globally operating bottled water companies and the bottled water consumption in the world. The first map shows the total bottled water consumption including a world population cartogram as a reference. In addition, the countries are shaded by their per capita consumption of bottled water (a worldmapper-style version of this map is shown at the bottom of this page):

Map I: Global Bottled Water Consumption (total and per capita)Cartogram / Map of the Global Bottled Water Consumption (total and per capita)(click for larger view)

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Mapping people, not sheep: Why our planet’s well-being can look so different

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Today I held a talk at the IDEA CETL Applied Ethics Research seminar at the University of Leeds. My talk was titled ‘Mapping people, not sheep: Why our planet’s well-being can look so different’ and focused on issues of mapping well-being in new ways. Continue reading →

People at Risk: Visualising Global Earthquake Intensity

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Read more about this map:
Paper in the Journal of Maps: Gridded cartograms as a method for visualising earthquake risk at the global scale
University of Sheffield Press Release
German-language news article: Weltkarte zeigt Menschen in Erdbebengefahr

Besides all the disturbing images in media, the devastating Japan earthquake has already been intensively documented in the world of mapping, ranging from USGS’s geophysical maps, ESRI’s Social Media mashup, and media features such as the excellent New York Times features (see here and here). More online map and imagery resources have been compiled by the editors of Directions Magazine (see here). Similar responses could already be observed during the Christchurch earthquake, which demonstrates, how fast such information is released and processed nowadays.
The following map shows a more general approach of mapping the risk of earthquakes. It is a visualisation of all major earthquakes that have been complied in the Global Significant Earthquake Database. The database created by NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center “contains information on destructive earthquakes from 2150 B.C. to the present that meet at least one of the following criteria: Moderate damage (approximately $1 million or more), 10 or more deaths, Magnitude 7.5 or greater, Modified Mercalli Intensity X or greater, or the earthquake generated a tsunami“.
Following an approach of spatial-analyst.net, a kernel density has been calculated from these records to visualise the areas most at risk of earthquakes during that time period. In a last step, I have transformed the world earthquake intensity map (see map inset) using a density equalising cartogram algorithm applied to a population grid. Simply said, the resulting map gives each person living on earth the same amount of space while also preserving the geographical reference. This map allows to understand the earthquake intensity in relation to today’s population distribution, and thus gives an idea of where most people are of risk related to seismic activity (there is an updated version of this map showing labels for the world’s largest cities here: Megacities and Earthquake Risk).

Global Earthquake Intensity Map visualised on a gridded population cartogram.
(click for larger map)

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A Population Map of Tibet

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The 10th March is a controversial day in the history of Tibet: It marks the anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 and thus contributed considerably to todays political state. As the Tibet Autonomous Region it is now governed as a Chinese province, and political demands for an independent Tibet regularly find their way into the public debate. The latest in these developments is the announcement of the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, to retire from political life. While the Tibetan Parliament is a government-in-exile, ethnic Tibetans are estimated to make up 93% of the population within the Tibet Autonomous Region, with an increasing rise of Han Chinese in the last decades. The total population living in Tibet is estimated to be 2.91 million, and the region has China’s lowest population density, with only 2.2 people per square km. Hence it is no surprise that the gridded population cartogram of China in the world population atlas gives Tibet little space in the map there (situated below the larger bulge that is Urumqi, and by far degraded by China’s populous Eastern provinces). To get a better picture of the population distribution within the region, I created a gridded population cartogram for the area of Tibet which gives a more detailed impression of the Tibet’s population distribution (using the boundaries of the Tibet Autonomous Region). The population cartogram also includes a transformed topographic display that illustrates at which elevations most people live in this region that is the highest region on earth :

Population Map / Cartogram of Tibet
(click for larger map)

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The International Year of Forests 2011

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International Year of Forests 2011The 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 →

Demographic Trends of Greater London 2001-2031

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Re-Mapping London
Population Map of the United Kingdom (Gridded Population Projection)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 →