CIESIN World Data Center: News
New Human Footprint Data Now Available
Date: March 17, 2008
CIESIN has released an updated version of The Human Footprint, a data set that aims to measure the extent of human influence on the Earth’s surface. First produced in 2002 by CIESIN with the Wildlife Conservation Society, this new version of The Human Footprint uses updated data on human population density, land transformation, human access, electrical power infrastructure, and settlements. Urban boundaries are drawn from CIESIN’s urban population data (Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP)), which is more recent (circa 2000) and is also a better representation of urban boundaries than what was used in the first version. The population density data (Global Population of the World (GPWv3)), produced by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN, also have a number of improvements over the data used in the earlier version. The roads data are more complete, particularly concerning roads in Africa and Latin America; a greater number of navigable rivers is included; and more extensive land cover data are used.Data available for download include the Human Influence Index, Human Footprint, and the Last of the Wild data sets.
New Study in Nature Maps Global Hotspots of Emerging Diseases
Date: Feb 21, 2008A new study appearing in the Feb. 21 issue of Nature presents the first scientific evidence that emerging diseases are on the rise and that zoonoses—diseases from wildlife—are the prime threat, due to encroachment of wild areas by human population growth and related impacts. CIESIN’s deputy director Marc Levy is a co-author of the study, “Global Trends in Emerging Infectious Diseases,” which built a predictive model by correlating population data from the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN with analysis of emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004. “Overlaying maps of where the zoonotic diseases have occurred, with population maps, allows a pattern of relationships to emerge,” says Levy, “and is a first step in prediction.” The result is a global map of emerging disease “hotspots” that shows a pattern of growing vulnerability to new diseases in rich as well as poor nations, with implications for further prediction and prevention. The study also offers insights into the role of conservation in preventing new diseases and the importance of reviewing approaches to allocation of public health resources in order to reduce risk.
In addition to Levy and former CIESIN colleagues Deborah Balk and Adam Storeygard, now at Baruch College, CUNY and Brown University, respectively, the international research team included scientists from the Consortium Conservation Medicine (CCM) Wildlife Trust New York; The University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology; and The Institute of Zoology at the Zoological Society of London, where lead author of the study and former Earth Institute fellow Kate Jones is now senior fellow. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. More about the study and NPR Interview: "Study Finds Emerging Diseases on Rise”
2008 Environmental Performance Index Released
Date: January 23, 2008
The Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland was the venue for the release today of the 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), co-authored by CIESIN and Yale University’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Last released in 2006, the EPI ranks 149 countries on 25 indicators across six policy categories: Environmental Health, Air Pollution, Water Resources, Biodiversity and Habitat, Productive Natural Resources, and Climate Change. Each indicator in the EPI measures how close each country comes to broadly-accepted targets, on a 0–100 scale. As a quantitative gauge of environmental outcomes, the Index is meant to provide a powerful tool for improving policymaking by shifting environmental decisionmaking onto firmer analytic foundations.The 2008 EPI ranks Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Costa Rica as the top five overall countries. Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Niger occupy the bottom five positions. The U.S. is ranked 39th, lower than most industrial countries.
The Index also provides “peer group” rankings for each country, comparing performance of countries facing similar environmental challenges. These benchmarks allow easy tracking of leaders and laggards on an issue-by-issue and aggregate basis. The data also support efforts to identify “best practices” in the environmental realm.
