Researchers of the University of Southampton have started a new survey that will provide detailed population information to help fight poverty and poor health.
The aim of the online project is to compile global demographic data, which can be used to help fight problems like poverty, public health, sustainable urban development and food security.
"Our maps and data are helping charities, policy-makers, governments and researchers to make decisions which affect the quality of people's lives. These could be as diverse as predicting the spread of infectious diseases, planning the development of transport systems or distributing vital aid to disaster zones," said geographer at Southampton Dr Andy Tatem, who is leading the project in a press statement. "For example, in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with devastating effect, international organizations were able to download information about population density from our website to help with estimating impact and delivering aid efforts."
The data will be available on the WorldPop website and will contain a combination of country specific data from national statistics services, household surveys and other sources to construct detailed population distribution maps.
Researchers of University of Southampton have also made use of satellite imagery to provide information on the density of urban areas, land cover and transport networks. Currently, the website contains freely available data for Central and South America, Africa and Asia. This data includes population numbers and age distributions, births, pregnancies, urban growth and rates of poverty. Each country has its own summary page and the user can choose from a range of high resolution maps of their particular area of interest to download.
"The global human population is growing by over 80 million a year, and is projected to reach the 10 billion mark within 50 years. The vast majority of this growth is expected to be concentrated in low income countries, and primarily in urban areas. The effects of such rapid growth are well documented, with the economies, environment and health of nations all undergoing significant change," said Dr. Tatem. "High resolution, contemporary data on human population distributions and their compositions, which WorldPop provides, are necessary to accurately measure the impacts of population growth, in order to monitor change and plan interventions."
