Population Pressure

The Population Pressure (PP) pilot service is one out of a group of three services – named Conflict Indicators – that provide conflict related geo-spatial information for countries at risk of armed conflict or with ongoing conflicts. All three proposed services provide refined geographical and thematic information related to conflicts at sub-national level. They offer products to be used in the security realm.

This service focuses on urban areas and examines their development over time, since urban development is a proxy for population growth. Both the extent of the built-up area and its structural characteristics are monitored. This allows the inference of links to population numbers, occupancy and economic status (e.g. poor slums, middle class residential). Multi-year comparisons of this index allow the derivation of urban growth, and the consequent potential security threats of the growth in slum areas.

Core products

The core geo-information provided by the PP service is the extent of built-up area and built-up area changes.

This information is combined with other non-Earth observation data provided by other sources such as population growth.

The following maps are provided by the service:

Multi-temporal built-up maps
Built-up change maps
Urban structure maps
Multi-temporal built-up area mapping monitoring the development of the urban area

Multi-temporal built-up area mapping

Urban structure mapping

Service coordination

This pilot service is coordinated by the Joint Research Centre with the efforts of other partners inside the G-MOSAIC project : Adelphi Research, GISAT, IST, Astrium GEO-Information Services, Swisspeace, and Z-GIS.