Abstract
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Chicago, Ill., are using NASA Earth observations to map, monitor, and forecast water and air quality, urban heat island effects, landslide risks, and more.
Highlights
What Is Urbanization?Urbanization is a complex socio-economic process that transforms the built environment, converting formerly rural into urban settlements, while shifting the spatial distribution of a population from rural to urban areas
Introduction and Policy ImplicationsThe future of the world’s population is urban.1 With more than half of the world’s people living in urban areas, urbanization determines the spatial distribution of the world’s population and is one of the four demographic mega-trends, with the growth of the global population, population ageing, and international migration
Today, the most urbanized regions include Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean (81 per cent), Europe (74 per cent) and Oceania (68 per cent)
Summary
Urbanization is a complex socio-economic process that transforms the built environment, converting formerly rural into urban settlements, while shifting the spatial distribution of a population from rural to urban areas. Growth in the urban population is driven by an overall population increase and by the upward shift in the percentage living in urban areas Together, these two factors are projected to add 2.5 billion to the world’s urban population by 2050, with almost 90 per cent of this growth happening in Asia and Africa. It is assumed that the most recently observed urban-rural growth difference for a given country (between two consecutive censuses) will follow a linear trend in the future, until it reaches an expected global urban-rural growth difference over a period of 25 years. The size of the urban population for each year was obtained by multiplying the estimated proportion urban at the national level by an estimate or projection of the total population of the country or area as contained in World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision (United Nations, 2017). Estimates and projections for countries and areas were aggregated to obtain corresponding figures for geographic regions and subregions, and for the world as a whole
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