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In the coming decades, city growth will be one of the most pressing policy challenges facing our world. The pattern of future city growth is particularly important for climate change policies that seek to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Along with the majority of global economic output, urban areas generate more than 70 percent of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. Cities with the largest and most rapid growth need to find ways to accommodate their expanding populations without doing further damage to our environment.
Global urbanization is a key area of exploration in Mathematica’s growing portfolio of environmental and climate research. But how do we emphasize the importance of this issue? We felt that developing a visual representation would help put it in perspective.
With a complex topic like climate change, technical language can deter people from learning more about the issues. It can even be daunting to read about the effects of climate change because of how bleak those effects can be for our planet. A well-presented data visualization, such as a satellite image showing the world warming over time, can be a powerful tool to clearly communicate the urgency of the matter and start conversations about these complex issues.
 Our interactive visualization traces the world’s increasing urbanization—highlighting its uneven pattern across the globe over time. (We used publicly available population data from the United Nations to construct it.) Showing the data on a world map lets viewers easily identify patterns of growth by region and make comparisons between urban agglomerations. This visualization can help prompt consideration of the geographic areas that might need the most policy focus, and can be a key tool in Mathematica’s mission to put evidence in the hands of decision makers who serve the public good.
With this project we want to appeal to a curious audience without requiring an expert’s knowledge, and still enabling users with greater interest in urbanization to dig deeply into the data. Text interspersed throughout the animated visualization tells the story of global urbanization as the map becomes increasingly occupied by growing cities (particularly in Africa and Asia). You can also explore patterns over time and across continents—zoom in on an area, use the slider to examine specific years, and even click any city to get population and growth rate estimates for each year.
This flexible data visualization captures the complexity of global urbanization and is generalizable enough to be used in many research areas. Sustainable development of cities has implications not only for climate change, but also for a number of development areas, including information technology infrastructure, public health, urban planning, and governance.
Each growing city on this map shows that the urban development issue is both global and local. It is critical to identify the areas of rapid urban growth to help understand where—for climate change or other development issues—thoughtful actions, policies, and investments will make the most difference. Visualizing the issue is an important step toward designing effective policy.
Global urbanization is a key area of exploration in Mathematica’s growing portfolio of environmental and climate research. But how do we emphasize the importance of this issue?",
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