Gridded Population Data is Key to Leaving No One off the Map

Written by Alyson Marks

How do we better understand our fellow citizens? How can we ensure that everyone has access to essential resources, particularly those in hard-to-reach areas and conflict and disaster-ridden regions? Having reliable and accurate population data is essential to answering these questions.

The 2030 SDG Agenda promises to leave no one behind, but to fulfill this promise we need quality, timely, and accurate population data to account for everyone everywhere. Recent innovations in geospatial technology and remote sensing have paved the way for gridded population datasets to help fill these important gaps, but information is still lacking on their unique characteristics, potential, and limitations. These issues were highlighted during this week’s webinar, “Leaving No One off the Map: Gridded Population Data for Decision-Making,” hosted by TReNDS in partnership with Geospatial World Media featuring TReNDS Co-Chair and Director of CIESIN, Bob Chen, and TReNDS Manager, Maryam Rabiee.

Source: Geospatial World Media

While policymakers frequently rely on traditional data sources, such as census and surveys for population estimates, these traditional sources often present geographic and temporal challenges. For example, Lebanon’s most recent census is from 1932! Gridded population data enable users to obtain population counts more frequently and reliably, but with the complexity and range of these new offerings, data users often don’t have the time or technical expertise to understand how the datasets were derived, as well as their varying characteristics. TReNDS forthcoming report, introduced during the webinar, seeks to address these issues by providing policymakers with a simple description of six gridded population datasets; guidelines to the datasets for different applications; an intercomparison assessment; use cases from various sectors; and eleven decision-making criteria to better inform users’ selection process to generate more relevant population estimates. The report will be released in Spring 2020.

The webinar also featured an overview of our work with the POPGRID Data Collaborative and an introduction to the recently updated website.

To watch the webinar, click here and for more information on POPGRID, visit here.