Environmental Sustainability

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CSD Coastal Population Indicator: Data and Methodology Page

Introduction

The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) maintains a list of a core set of indicators of sustainable development. CIESIN is the lead agency for the indicator entitled Percentage of Total Population Living in Coastal Areas. As a service to the community, CIESIN, through the SEDAC project, is providing pre-calculated national-level data for this indicator and one alternative: Percentage of Total Population Living in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (<10 meters elevation).

Data

Data on the percentage of a country's total population living within 100 and 200 km of the coastal zone is available through our Population, Lanscapes and Climate Estimates (PLACE v.2) collection.

Data on the percentage of a country's total population living within the low elevation coastal zone (less than 10 meters elevation) are available through the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ) page of the Global-Rural Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) and Gridded Population of the World (GPW) Web site. This data set also includes an estimate of the land area in the LECZ that is classified as urban, with which it is possible to calculate the percentage of the LECZ that is urban (based on the GRUMP data set).

Methodology

CSD methodology sheet (PDF, 99KB) for the percentage of total population living in coastal areas, extracted from the CSD's "Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies – third edition" (2007) .

Countries wishing to undertake their own analyses based on the CSD methodology sheet for the coastal indicator may be interested in the gridded population data provided through the Gridded Population of the World (GPW v.3) and Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project Web site.