Within the next five years rural living will have reached its climax. According to the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects (a biennial publication from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs), rural populations will have reached their absolute high in 2022 with approximately 3.38 billion people. This is only slightly up from the current 3.37 billion people, showing how the number of people not living in cities has flatlined since the turn of the century and comes after a period of continuous growth since the 1950s when only 1.78 billion people lived in the countryside. The current long-term projections see this number going slightly down to 3.2 billion people by 2050.
While the rural population has become a minority globally (at approximately 46 per cent), the majority of those are increasingly concentrated in the poorer parts of the world. Sixty-nine per cent of people in the least developed countries live in rural areas, while this number is at only 20 per cent in higher-income countries.
Tag Archives: cartogram
Atlas of Organics: Mapping organic agriculture
Building upon a previous publication investigating organic agriculture based on the reported hectares of certified organically managed agriculture land I have continued this little project in collaboration with John Paull to extend our attempt to quantify and map the world of organic agriculture, which led to the creation of a new atlas of organic agriculture. Here we compiled the following global organics data: (1) certified organic agriculture hectares; (2) certified organic producers; (3) total certified organic production hectares (organic agriculture plus wildculture plus forestry plus aquaculture); (4) certified organic wildculture hectares and mapped these using Worldmapper-style density-equalising cartograms. The maps illustrate the broad global diffusion of the organics meme, visually highlight leaders and laggers, and indicate opportunities for growth and better reportage.
In the world map of the organic agriculture hectares Australia dominates the picture, while Europe is strongly represented, and Africa is weakly represented:
(Un)Happy Nations
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March, 20th is the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness, recognising ‘the importance of happiness in the lives of people around the world’. Bhutan is credited as the first country to have implemented the concept of ‘Gross National Happiness’ as an official measure for the state of a nation, introduced in 1972. After the global financial crash in 2008, ideas about giving the ‘spiritual, physical, social and environmental health of [people] and natural environment’ more prominence over mere economic development are reflected more and more in international efforts towards a sustainable future.
The Happy Planet Index (HPI), developed by the New Economics Foundation, takes a rather radical approach on this issue. It aims to measure well-being and happiness by taking a universal and long-term approach to understanding, how efficiently people in a country are using their environmental resources to live long and happy lives.
This cartogram maps the results of the 2016 Happy Planet Index from the perspective of people. The gridded population cartogram shows the world resized according to the number of people living in each area, combined with the national HPI score:
EU Migration to and from the UK
The recent UK government defeat on its Brexit bill by the House of Lords based on the demand that ministers should guarantee EU nationals’ right to stay in the UK after Brexit was just the latest tale in the debate about EU migration and the United Kingdom’s role in it. The topic of migrants in the UK was an important element of the EU referendum campaigns in 2016 which led to the decision to leave the European Union. The government’s position sees the question of the rights of EU migrants as part of the upcoming negotiations with the EU where also the rights of UK citizens living in the European Unions need to be agreed. In terms of absolute numbers, this is a much smaller share of affected people (approximately 1.2 million UK citizens are estimated to live in other EU countries) compared to other EU citizens living in the UK (estimated at around 3.2 million). The following two maps show these numbers in comparison in their geographical dimension. Using the most recent annual estimates (published in late 2016 by the ONS and further data from the UN) the cartograms show the countries of the EU (excluding the UK) distorted by the number of UK citizens who are living in another EU country (left map) and by the number of other EU citizens who are living in the UK. The countries are shaded by their ratio between the number of UK migrants in the EU and the number of other EU migrants in the UK:
Destination: Iceland
1,767,726 people have visited Iceland through Keflavik Airport in 2016. These statistics from the Icelandic Tourism Board (Ferðamálastofa) confirm that there has been an exponential growth in tourism to the country. Six years ago, when this latest growth really started after the infamous Eyjafjallajökull eruption. It looks as if this incident triggered a new wave of tourism, Inspired by Eruptions?, further fueled by new flights not only from established European mostly low cost carriers but also from the new Icelandic carrier Wow air founded in 2011. Globally successful movies and TV series further helped putting Iceland on the map of the global tourism industry.
Coast Lines
The question about the length of the world’s coastlines is not as easy to answer as it would initially seem. Continue reading