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

Jing Gao () and Brian C. O’Neill
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Jing Gao: University of Delaware
Brian C. O’Neill: University of Denver

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15788-7

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