Spatial Population Scenarios

The projected size and spatial distribution of future population are important drivers of global change and key determinants of exposure and vulnerability to hazards. Researchers from NCAR’s IAM group and the City University of New York Institute for Demographic Research developed a new set of global, spatially explicit population scenarios that are consistent with the new Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The SSPs describe alternative future pathways of societal change that were developed to facilitate global change research.

The spatial population scenarios cover the period 2010-2100 in ten-year time steps. The projections were initially made at a spatial resolution of 1/8-degree, and were later downscaled to 1-km resolution. Read more about the scenarios in the Environmental Research Letters paper “Spatially explicit global population scenarios consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways”, and the NCAR Technical Note “Downscaling Global Spatial Population Projections from 1/8-degree to 1-km Grid Cells”.

Spatial Population Scenario Downloads

Contact Dr. Jing Gao [ jinggao@udel.edu ] for information related the following data sets.

Cite as

Jones, B., O’Neill, B.C., 2016. Spatially explicit global population scenarios consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Environmental Research Letters 11, 84003. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084003.

Gao, J., 2017. Downscaling Global Spatial Population Projections from 1/8-degree to 1-km Grid Cells. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-537+STR, DOI: 10.5065/D60Z721H.

1/8-degree projections

The 1/8-degree spatial population scenarios are available as zipped files in multiple formats (NetCDF, GeoTIFF, ASCII, and GRID).

2010-2100 (projections)

2000 (base year data)

1-km downscaled projections

The 1-km downscaled spatial population scenarios are available as zipped GeoTIFF files.

The 1-km downscaled spatial population scenarios are available as netCDF files.