Panel data on global nighttime lights, revised GDP, shadow prices, costs of co2 emissions, neo and reo during 1992-2019

Geospatial data have become a valuable asset in the 21st century with its applications in almost everyday life and an overriding scope in the field of research. One such growing spatial data is the remotely sensed nighttime lights (NTL) imagery, which simply is a depiction of human activities around the globe at night. It may be a stunning visual to many yet the valuable insights it provides in measuring a number of parameters like population, poverty, electrification, migration, disaster, health, fishing, fires, GDP, pollution, urbanization, settlement, etc. have made researchers and scientists look up to this data to validate and evaluate socio-economic and other indicators independently and concurrently. Apart from using as a proxy in many researches, NTL allows to track statistics of region where data is often not collected or is not reliable. It has potential applications for policy makers and government in the decision making processes. Nighttime lights were in used since the mid 1990's and are publicly made available from 1992 onwards through the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) provided by National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A more advance system called Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day Night band (DNB) replaces DMSP system. The extraction provided uses VIIRS monthly aggregates with spatial polygon units of India at sub-districts level. The monthly raw dataset is available from April 2012 onwards. This extraction cover 141 months till December 2023. The primary intent is to disseminate the dataset to a larger audience, be it researcher or policy analyst and planners. The broader objective is to keep on updating the data continuously.

We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data—the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset—surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries globally. Doing so allows a retrospective look at the global, long-term relationships between night-time lights and a series of socio-economic indicators. We find the strongest correlations with electricity consumption, CO2 emissions, and GDP, followed by population, CH4 emissions, N2O emissions, poverty (inverse) and F-gas emissions. Relating area lit to electricity consumption shows that while a basic linear model provides a good statistical fit, regional and temporal trends are found to have a significant impact.

The Gross Domestic Product per capita (gross domestic product divided by mid-year population converted to international dollars, using purchasing power parity rates) has been identified as an important determinant of susceptibility and vulnerability by different authors and used in the Disaster Risk Index 2004 (Peduzzi et al. 2009, Schneiderbauer 2007, UNDP 2004) and is commonly used as an indicator for a country's economic development (e.g. Human Development Index). Despite some criticisms (Brooks et al. 2005) it is still considered useful to estimate a population's susceptibility to harm, as limited monetary resources are seen as an important factor of vulnerability. However, collection of data on economic variables, especially sub-national income levels, is problematic, due to various shortcomings in the data collection process. Additionally, the informal economy is often excluded from official statistics. Night time lights satellite imagery of NOAA grid provides an alternative means for measuring economic activity. NOAA scientists developed a model for creating a world map of estimated total (formal plus informal) economic activity. Regression models were developed to calibrate the sum of lights to official measures of economic activity at the sub-national level for some target Country and at the national level for other countries of the world, and subsequently regression coefficients were derived. Multiplying the regression coefficients with the sum of lights provided estimates of total economic activity, which were spatially distributed to generate a 30 arc-second map of total economic activity (see Ghosh, T., Powell, R., Elvidge, C. D., Baugh, K. E., Sutton, P. C., & Anderson, S. (2010).Shedding light on the global distribution of economic activity. The Open Geography Journal (3), 148-161). We adjusted the GDP to the total national GDPppp amount as recorded by IMF (International Monetary Fund) for 2010 and we divided it by the population layer from Worldpop Project. Further, we ran a focal statistics analysis to determine mean values within 10 cell (5 arc-minute, about 10 Km) of each grid cell. This had a smoothing effect and represents some of the extended influence of intense economic activity for local people. Finally we apply a mask to remove the area with population below 1 people per square Km.

This dataset has been produced in the framework of the "Climate change predictions in Sub-Saharan Africa: impacts and adaptations (ClimAfrica)" project, Work Package 4 (WP4). More information on ClimAfrica project is provided in the Supplemental Information section of this metadata.

Data publication: 2014-06-01

Supplemental Information:

ClimAfrica was an international project funded by European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for the period 2010-2014. The ClimAfrica consortium was formed by 18 institutions, 9 from Europe, 8 from Africa, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO).

ClimAfrica was conceived to respond to the urgent international need for the most appropriate and up-to-date tools and methodologies to better understand and predict climate change, assess its impact on African ecosystems and population, and develop the correct adaptation strategies. Africa is probably the most vulnerable continent to climate change and climate variability and shows diverse range of agro-ecological and geographical features. Thus the impacts of climate change can be very high and can greatly differ across the continent, and even within countries.

The project focused on the following specific objectives:

1. Develop improved climate predictions on seasonal to decadal climatic scales, especially relevant to SSA;

2. Assess climate impacts in key sectors of SSA livelihood and economy, especially water resources and agriculture;

3. Evaluate the vulnerability of ecosystems and civil population to inter-annual variations and longer trends (10 years) in climate;

4. Suggest and analyse new suited adaptation strategies, focused on local needs;

5. Develop a new concept of 10 years monitoring and forecasting warning system, useful for food security, risk management and civil protection in SSA;

6. Analyse the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture and water resources in SSA and the cost-effectiveness of potential adaptation measures.

The work of ClimAfrica project was broken down into the following work packages (WPs) closely connected. All the activities described in WP1, WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5 consider the domain of the entire South Sahara Africa region. Only WP6 has a country specific (watershed) spatial scale where models validation and detailed processes analysis are carried out.

Contact points:

Metadata Contact: FAO-Data

Resource Contact: Selvaraju Ramasamy

Resource constraints:

copyright

Online resources:

GDP per capita

Project deliverable D4.1 - Scenarios of major production systems in Africa

Climafrica Website - Climate Change Predictions In Sub-Saharan Africa: Impacts And Adaptations

Economic spatial distribution data is one of the important indicators for disaster loss assessment. The economy of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau region is relatively backward, and geological disasters occur frequently. Studying the impact of disasters in the region on the economy is of great significance. This study is based on the method of zoning and industry simulation, and establishes corresponding relationships between the GDP of the primary industry and land use types, DEM, village settlements, roads, and river buffer zones. After coupling the GDP of the secondary and tertiary industries with multiple information, spatial models are created for night lighting, building distribution, and interest point data in urban and county areas. Random forest is used to determine the weight of various indicators in the secondary and tertiary industries, calculate the grid value of GDP23, and finally superimpose GDP1 and GDP23 grids to build a 100 m Tibetan Plateau in 2020 × Spatial distribution map of GDP at 100 meters. Using municipal GDP statistical data for accuracy verification, the RMSE is 0.0388, indicating that the data can better reflect the spatial distribution of GDP in the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. This data can provide data support for disaster risk assessment, prevention and reduction in the Qinghai Tibet Plateau.

Economic data( Per capita GDP, GDP growth rate, Primary, secondary and tertiary industries to GDP, Gini index, Engel coefficient) of 34 key areas along the One Belt One Road are downscaled from coarse data. First, we collect the statistics of economic data( Per capita GDP, GDP growth rate, Primary, secondary and tertiary industries to GDP, Gini index, Engel coefficient) at the national or provincial scales, and use GIS spatial analysis methods to analyze the relationship between economic data and covariables (e.g.,night lighting NPP-VIIRS, road network density). Then, spatial regression analysis method is used to model relationship between the economic data and covariables, and economic data( Per capita GDP, GDP growth rate, Primary, secondary and tertiary industries to GDP, Gini index, Engel coefficient) at county level were downscaled and predicted. Based on statistical data and spatial analysis, the data of economic adult is finally integrated. The economic data( Per capita GDP, GDP growth rate, Primary, secondary and tertiary industries to GDP, Gini index, Engel coefficient) can provide important basic data for the development of social and economic research on key areas and regions along the Belt and Road.

The “richness index” represents the level of economical wellbeing a country certain area in 2010. Regions with higher income per capita and low poverty rate and more access to market are wealthier and are therefore better able to prepare for and respond to adversity. The index results from the second cluster of the Principal Component Analysis preformed among 9 potential variables. The analysis identifies four dominant variables, namely “GDPppp per capita”, “agriculture share GDP per agriculture sector worker”, “poverty rate” and “market accessibility”, assigning weights of 0.33, 0.26, 0.25 and 0.16, respectively. Before to perform the analysis all variables were log transformed (except the “agriculture share GDP per agriculture sector worker”) to shorten the extreme variation and then were score-standardized (converted to distribution with average of 0 and standard deviation of 1; inverse method was applied for the “poverty rate” and “market accessibility”) in order to be comparable. The 0.5 arc-minute grid total GDPppp is based on the night time light satellite imagery of NOAA (see Ghosh, T., Powell, R., Elvidge, C. D., Baugh, K. E., Sutton, P. C., & Anderson, S. (2010).Shedding light on the global distribution of economic activity. The Open Geography Journal (3), 148-161) and adjusted to national total as recorded by International Monetary Fund for 2010. The “GDPppp per capita” was calculated dividing the total GDPppp by the population in each pixel. Further, a focal statistic ran to determine mean values within 10 km. This had a smoothing effect and represents some of the extended influence of intense economic activity for the local people. Country based data for “agriculture share GDP per agriculture sector worker” were calculated from GDPppp (data from International Monetary Fund) fraction from agriculture activity (measured by World Bank) divided by the number of worker in the agriculture sector (data from World Bank). The tabular data represents the average of the period 2008-2012 and were linked by country unit to the national boundaries shapefile (FAO/GAUL) and then converted into raster format (resolution 0.5 arc-minute). The first administrative level data for the “poverty rate” were estimated by NOAA for 2003 using nighttime lights satellite imagery. Tabular data were linked by first administrative unit to the first administrative boundaries shapefile (FAO/GAUL) and then converted into raster format (resolution 0.5 arc-minute). The 0.5 arc-minute grid “market accessibility” measures the travel distance in minutes to large cities (with population greater than 50,000 people). This dataset was developed by the European Commission and the World Bank to represent access to markets, schools, hospitals, etc.. The dataset capture the connectivity and the concentration of economic activity (in 2000). Markets may be important for a variety of reasons, including their abilities to spread risk and increase incomes. Markets are a means of linking people both spatially and over time. That is, they allow shocks (and risks) to be spread over wider areas. In particular, markets should make households less vulnerable to (localized) covariate shocks. This dataset has been produced in the framework of the “Climate change predictions in Sub-Saharan Africa: impacts and adaptations (ClimAfrica)” project, Work Package 4 (WP4). More information on ClimAfrica project is provided in the Supplemental Information section of this metadata.

Data publication: 2014-05-15

Supplemental Information:

ClimAfrica was an international project funded by European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for the period 2010-2014. The ClimAfrica consortium was formed by 18 institutions, 9 from Europe, 8 from Africa, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO).

ClimAfrica was conceived to respond to the urgent international need for the most appropriate and up-to-date tools and methodologies to better understand and predict climate change, assess its impact on African ecosystems and population, and develop the correct adaptation strategies. Africa is probably the most vulnerable continent to climate change and climate variability and shows diverse range of agro-ecological and geographical features. Thus the impacts of climate change can be very high and can greatly differ across the continent, and even within countries.

The project focused on the following specific objectives:

1. Develop improved climate predictions on seasonal to decadal climatic scales, especially relevant to SSA;

2. Assess climate impacts in key sectors of SSA livelihood and economy, especially water resources and agriculture;

3. Evaluate the vulnerability of ecosystems and civil population to inter-annual variations and longer trends (10 years) in climate;

4. Suggest and analyse new suited adaptation strategies, focused on local needs;

5. Develop a new concept of 10 years monitoring and forecasting warning system, useful for food security, risk management and civil protection in SSA;

6. Analyse the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture and water resources in SSA and the cost-effectiveness of potential adaptation measures.

The work of ClimAfrica project was broken down into the following work packages (WPs) closely connected. All the activities described in WP1, WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5 consider the domain of the entire South Sahara Africa region. Only WP6 has a country specific (watershed) spatial scale where models validation and detailed processes analysis are carried out.

Contact points:

Metadata Contact: FAO-Data

Resource Contact: Selvaraju Ramasamy

Resource constraints:

copyright

Online resources:

Richness index (2010)

Project deliverable D4.1 - Scenarios of major production systems in Africa

Climafrica Website - Climate Change Predictions In Sub-Saharan Africa: Impacts And Adaptations

The West Africa Coastal Vulnerability Mapping: Economic Systems Index is a composite index based on several spatial indicators, including gridded Gross Domestic Product (GDP), nighttime lights as a proxy for urban built-up and industrial areas, and cocoa, coconut, palm oil, rubber, and banana production in metric tons. It covers the coastal region of West Africa within 200 km of the coast. Population growth in the coastal zone is mostly a function of migration related to coastal economic activities; this indicator provides insights into highly exposed coastal areas that not only have high levels of economic activity but also high population growth and migration.

The West Africa Coastal Vulnerability Mapping: Economic Systems Index is a composite index based on several spatial indicators, including gridded Gross Domestic Product (GDP), nighttime lights as a proxy for urban built-up and industrial areas, and cocoa, coconut, palm oil, rubber, and banana production in metric tons. It covers the coastal region of West Africa within 200 km of the coast. Population growth in the coastal zone is mostly a function of migration related to coastal economic activities; this indicator provides insights into highly exposed coastal areas that not only have high levels of economic activity but also high population growth and migration.

LDV = lagged dependent variable.For employment, GDP, or night lights, figures lagged variables correspond to levels in 2001; for urban population, year 2000.N denotes neighborhood variable, e.g., total (for agriculture and non-forest), mean (elevation and slope), or mode (for soil variables) within a city’s sixty minute neighborhood.**: p

This repository include an appendix and data for the article "Observing Disaster Community Resilience from Space: Using Nighttime Lights to Model Economic Disturbance and Recovery Pattern in Natural Disaster" submitted to the journal of Sustainable Cities and Society for review.

• Appendix.pdf includes detailed statistics and graphs supplementary for the regression analyses in the article.
• The Data folder include raw data that are used for the regression analysis and conversion from DMSP-OLS nighttime light data to county-level GDP

Quelle: Satellite data from DMSP-OLS distributed by the NOAA