Mapping global urban land for the 21st century with data-driven simulations and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 11; no. 1; p. 2302
• Main Authors: Gao, Jing, O'Neill, Brian C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Nature Publishing Group 08.05.2020; Nature Publishing Group UK; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 21st century; Environmental changes; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Expansion; Land cover; Land use; Mapping; Remote sensing; Science & Technology - Other Topics; Socioeconomics; Urban areas; Urban development
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15788-7

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.