Mapping global urban land for the 21st century with data-driven simulations and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways.
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Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32385275.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-15788-7 and PMC identifier 7210308.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Urban land expansion is one of the most visible, irreversible, and rapid types of land cover/land use change in contemporary human history, and is a key driver for many environmental and societal changes across scales. Yet spatial projections of how much and where it may occur are often limited to short-term futures and small geographic areas. Here we produce a first empirically-grounded set of global, spatial urban land projections over the 21st century. We use a data-science approach exploiting 15 diverse datasets, including a newly available 40-year global time series of fine-spatial-resolution remote sensing observations. We find the global total amount of urban land could increase by a factor of 1.8-5.9, and the per capita amount by a factor of 1.1-4.9, across different socioeconomic scenarios over the century. Though the fastest urban land expansion occurs in Africa and Asia, the developed world experiences a similarly large amount of new development.