On 19 March 2021 a volcanic eruption started in the Geldingadalir valley at the Fagradalsfjall mountain on the Reykjanes peninsula, South-West Iceland. The volcano is situated approximately 30 km from the country’s capital city, Reykjavík. The main period of the eruption lasted from March to September 2021. A second eruption started on 3 August 2022 in Meradalir valley at the Northern end of the first eruption and lasted just over two weeks. In the most recent developments, a new fissure opened further North next to Litli-Hrútur on 10 July 2023 (ongoing at the time of writing) and keeps changing and transforming the landscape in surrounding areas as a result.

Mapping an ongoing eruption poses a challenge: By the time a map has been produced, it already is out of date. Monitoring the dynamic activity therefore requires regular updates to understand how the eruption progresses. The following map can only provide a snapshot of the situation in the area. It shows the site of the Fagradalshraun named lava fields of the volcano with their original vent systems in their geographic context as they emerged during the active eruption period in 2021. Furthermore, this map now also includes the new eruption which started on 3 August 2022 in Meradalir at the northern end of the previous lava flows. The following map shows the first picture of the new and ongoing eruption and represents the lava flows as of 17 July 2022:

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The main lava flows shown in this map are based on data collected and processed by the National Land Survey of Iceland, the Icelandic Institute of Natural History and the Institute of Earth Sciences. Lava mapping approaches are based on the recently published work by Pedersen et al., 2022.

What did this all look like in reality when the first episode of the eruption was in full swing in 2021? The following photograph was taken on April 14th, 2021, and shows how the eruption activity has changed from one vent system (with two active vents) in March to a total of six vent systems (with eight vents in total) along the main fissure of the eruption, marking one of the visibly most active phase of the eruption so far:

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By mid-May, the picture had changed considerably. Four week after the above picture was taken, on 17 May 2021, all but one vent system had ceased activity. The eruption was now showing a geyser-style behaviour (see photo at the start of this page), erupting every few minutes up to a few hundred metres into the air and adding the highest volume of lava discharge to date with 12.4 cubic metres per second. By early June 54 million cubic metres of lava were released since the eruption had started.

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Notes on the toponyms shown in the map above: Fagradalshraun (‘beautiful valley lava’) was decided as the name for the new lava fields that cover several of the valleys surrounding the eruption site. But several names have been making the rounds in the first months of the eruption, referring to the different geographic features in the area that are all marked in this map. Fagradalsfjall (‘Beautiful valley mountain’) is the name for the plateau to the west of the valley where the eruption started. The eruption itself started in Geldingadalir (‘Valleys of the geldings’). While in this latest map I use Geldingadalir as a toponym, I have made use of -dalur before, which is the singular form of the Icelandic word for valley which is also sometimes found in use (both in Icelandic and in English). Given the shape of the valley, this appears to make more sense geomorphologically (and in the Icelandic public you find both names used regularly). I eventually decided to change this in the map into -dalir since the register of placenames by the Icelandic Land Survey has this name listed as the sole name in their database (see Landmælingar Íslands – Örnefnasjá). The valleys to the east are called Meradalir (notice the plural again, literally ‘Valleys of the meres’). This is the area where where the lava flows first spilled over into, following the opening of the second vent system in early April. I also added Nátthagi, the valley where the lava now could flow into if the protection walls that are being built will not hold it back. This valley would then lead the lava flows towards the main road and would therefore affect some infrastructure should it continue to flow towards the south. More landscape features will be added shall they become relevant in the context of the eruption.

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The map on this website is updated as the eruption progresses and the lava flows keep changing. The following list gives an overview of all versions of this map that were published on this page (clicking the link opens the respective map in a new browser window). Each revision contains updated coverage of lava flows as well as additional adjustments as noted:

2023
• 1 August 2023 (lava flow update as of 26 July 2023)
• 19 July 2023 (first update following the 10 July 2023 eruption at Litli-Hrútur, lava flow update as of 17 July, redesign to adjust to new map dimensions and extended area to include the latest eruption site, hiking paths extended and updates, new toponyms added)

2022

• 17 August 2022 (lava flow update as of 15 August, main title renamed back to Fagradalsfjall to indicate the location of the entire eruption site, main hiking path A highlighted slightly more prominently than the other paths in the area)
• 5 August 2022 (first update following the 3 August 2022 eruption in Meradalir)
   

2021

• 28 October 2021 (minor visual adjustments)
• 2 October 2021 (lava flow hillshade added)
• 20 September 2021 (further adjustments to trails and parking sites)
• 15 September 2021 (Path labels and more placenames added to the map)
• 11 August 2021 (artificial walls added to the map)
• 31 July 2021
• 2 July 2021 (new scale to cover a larger area)
• 27 June 2021
• 18 June 2021
• 6 June 2021
• 4 June 2021
• 20 May 2021
• 5 May 2021
• 27 April 2021
• 22 April 2021
• 19 April 2021
• 15 April 2021

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig of the Spatial Analysis & Geovisualisation Research Group at the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Iceland using own field observations and data sources as referenced in the map. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post Where the lava flows: Volcano update from Iceland was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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The Arctic Circle Assembly is the largest annual international gathering on the Arctic, attended by more than 2000 participants from over 60 countries. The Assembly is held every October in Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center, Reykjavík, Iceland. With the event on the doorstep, a closer look at who has stakes in this region that has received a growing interest in recent years. The following map shows all nations that have territorial claims in the Arctic, the region that is defined as the area that lies North of the Arctic Circle at about 66°34’N:

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Six nations share direct territorial claims in the Arctic through their exclusive economic zones(EEZ) that reach into the international waters above the Arctic Circle. These zones reach 200 nautical miles from the coast of the state as depicted in this map. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea states that:
“In the exclusive economic zone, the coastal State has:
(a) sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, of the waters superjacent to the seabed and of the seabed and its subsoil, and with regard to other activities for the economic exploitation and exploration of the zone, such as the production of energy from the water, currents and winds; […]”
While also being situated within the Arctic Circle, Sweden and Finland have no coastline in the region and are therefore excluded from claims to the territorial seas there. Denmark’s territorial claims are made through Greenland which is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, as are the Faroe Islands whose EEZ does not reach into Arctic waters.

A main reason for the growing geopolitical interest in the region lies in climate change which makes the resources in the region more accessible, as well as the potential for new shipping routes that would considerably shorted routes such as those between Europe and Asia. The impact of climate change becomes obvious when studying the changing sea ice extent over recent decades.
This map shows the Arctic Sea ice in its minimum and maximum extent during the year 2020. The month with the smallest extent was in September, while the maximum was reached towards the end of the Arctic winter in March. The map also shows the median sea ice extent in the region over a 30 year period from 1981 to 2010 for comparison. The National Snow and Ice Data Center noted that the minimum extent in 2020 was the second lowest in the nearly 42-year satellite record.

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This blog post is a modified version of content published in the July 2021 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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Germans went to the polls to elect a new parliament and along with it a new government and a new chancellor. Since outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel did not stand for re-election after 16 years in office, this election marked a turning point in German politics. Without her standing as ‘Spitzenkandidat’, the election campaign turned into a heated fight for voter support with three parties having led the polls at times in the run-up to the election (CDU/CSU, SPD and the Greens). The final result saw the Social Democrats (SPD) winning the race after having trailed in the polls for a long time. They started catching up a few weeks ahead of the election and ended up securing 25.7 percent of the votes in the list vote (Zweitstimme) that determines the proportional distribution of seats (5.2% more than in 2017, resulting in 206 seats of the 735 seat strong parliament).
Having lost 7.9 percent points, CDU came second with 18.9 percent of the list vote (151 seats). The Green party (Grüne) came third with their best-ever result in a federal election, winning 14.8 percent of the list vote (up 5.8%, 118 seats), yet far lower than the mid-20s they polled in earlier in the year. FDP remained at a stable 11.5 percent (up 0.7%, 92 seats). The extreme right ‘Alternative for Germany‘ (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) re-entered federal parliament (Bundestag) but with a smaller vote share of 10.3% (down 2.3%, 83 seats). CSU, the Bavarian sister-party of CDU won 5.2 percent (down 1%, 45 seats) Die Linke went down to 4.9% of the list votes but remains in parliament through the number of directly elected seats from the constituency vote (39 seats). Danish minority party SSW reached 0.1 percent in the list vote but gained one seat through special rules for parties representing minorities. Other parties not represented in parliament accounted for 7.2 percent of the valid votes.
Coalition talks are ongoing so that it is not clear yet, which parties are going to form the next government and who will become the 9th Federal Chancellor since 1949. This gives time to ponder over all the political changes that happened across the country – what better way to do so than through a series of maps, such as the 18 maps shown in this blog that dissect over 22,000 data points in cartographic form. Let’s start with an overview: The following pair of maps shows on the left the winning parties of the constituency vote (Erststimme) which directly elects a constituency into parliament and on the right the strongest party in the list vote (Zweitstimme) which determines the proportional representation for each party in the new parliament. These results are shown in large as gridded population cartograms which are proportional to the respective population there, accompanied by a small ‘conventional’ land area map:

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How significant these results are can be seen when viewing the list vote winners of the previous 2017 and this year’s 2021 general election side by side:

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In these cartograms, each transformed grid cell reflects the total number of people living in that area. The following topographic cartogram provides a reference for the electoral maps above:

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Since Germany’s electoral system is based on proportional representation, the above shown election maps reveal only part of the changes that were unfolding in this year’s general election since they focus on the strongest party only. The following cartogram series provides a detailed look into the changed political landscapes of Germany following the 2021 Federal election in September. The cartograms give a clearer picture of the vote share distribution for each major party, as well as an overview of turnout and spoilt votes. The vote shares determine the constitution of parliament, in combination with the gained seats from the constituency vote that are counted against the vote share of the list vote for each party.
Despite an increased turnout, which went up to 76.6 percent (from 76.2 percent in 2017), non-voters are the single-largest group in German politics. With 14.3 million eligible voters who decided not to vote, this group is even larger than the total number of votes of the largest party (SPD), which received 12.2 million total votes in the list vote (Zweitstimme). The following two maps show the distribution of turnout and also the distribution of the 499,163 spoiled votes on an equal-population projection:

Turnout and Invalid Votes

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The above two maps as well as the vote share in the following maps shows the underlying data divided into decile groups based on the country’s 299 constituencies. This means that 10 percent of the constituencies fall into each of the 10 classes depicted in the maps. This allows for a better understanding of each party’s strongholds across the country and therefore gives a picture of the new political landscapes that are going to shape German politics in the forthcoming years.
The following maps visualise the vote share of all parties that are represented in the new parliament. A party needs to reach 5 percent of the vote share to enter parliament unless it manages to secure a direct seat through the constituency vote. Not shown here is the map for Südschleswigsche Wählerverband (SSW), a Danish minority party in Northern Germany for which the 5 per cent rule does not apply and which secured one seat in the new parliament. In order to also understand how these political landscapes have shifted and changed since the last election, the map on the right shows, how each party’s vote share has changed in percent point compared to the 2017 general election). The classes in the change maps remain constant in all maps which allows these changes to be seen in comparison across all parties. The maps below are ordered in decreasing order of each party’s vote share at the 2021 election:

SPD (25.7% / 206 seats)

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CDU/CSU (18.9/5.2%, 151/45 seats)
Shown in a combined map since the two sister parties do not compete:
CSU stands for election in Bavaria only, where CDU does not operate

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Die Grünen (14.8% / 118 seats)

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FDP (11.5% / 92 seats)

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AfD (10.1% / 83 seats)

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Die Linke (4.9% / 39 seats)

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The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig using official results of the 2021 election published by Bundeswahlleiter (with own calculations). Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post Bundestagswahl 2021: Map Views of the German Federal Election was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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This cartogram shows the distribution of votes for the two main candidates in the 2020 US Presidential election. Shown in diverging colours is each respective candidate who received the largest share of votes in each county. The cartogram itself shows an equal-population projection (gridded population cartogram) where each grid cell in the map is resized according to the total number of people living there. The main cartogram is accompanied by a ‘conventional’ reference map that also shows the states of Alaska and Hawaii (using state-level results for these two states):

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The map shown here displays the projected county level results as of November, 16th, with final results not having been declared yet everywhere. The majority of results shown here reflect at least 95 per cent of the votes counted, though possible legal challenges might still result in some adjustments to this overall map.

A full cartographic roundup of the 2020 Presidential Election, including several more state-level maps and some further insights into how Joe Biden and Donald Trump performed across the country can be found on Worldmapper:

The content on this page has been created by Worldmapper using data from the New York Times made available by favstats. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post US Presidential Election 2020 was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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According to the UK Office for National Statistics, “there were 90,232 deaths occurring in England and Wales [between 1 March and 17 April 2020] that were registered by 18 April; 20,283 of these deaths involved the coronavirus (COVID-19).” The following map plots this data which has been made available at small area statistics on May, 1st, showing the COVID-19-related deaths as a share of all cause deaths in each area of the two nations. The left map shows a conventional map for reference, while the cartogram on the right is proportional to each areas respective population, so that more populated urban areas appear larger than sparsely populated rural areas:

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The ONS highlights a number of points that emerge in this snapshot of the pandemic:
“When adjusting for size and age structure of the population, there were 36.2 deaths involving COVID-19 per 100,000 people in England and Wales.
London had the highest age-standardised mortality rate with 85.7 deaths per 100,000 persons involving COVID-19; this was statistically significantly higher than any other region and almost double the next highest rate.
The local authorities with the highest age-standardised mortality rates for deaths involving COVID-19 were all London Boroughs; Newham had the highest age-standardised rate with 144.3 deaths per 100,000 population followed by Brent with a rate of 141.5 deaths per 100,000 population and Hackney with a rate of 127.4 deaths per 100,000 population.
The age-standardised mortality rate of deaths involving COVID-19 in the most deprived areas of England was 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared with 25.3 deaths per 100,000 population in the least deprived areas
In Wales, the most deprived areas had a mortality rate for deaths involving COVID-19 of 44.6 deaths per 100,000 population, almost twice as high as the least deprived area of 23.2 deaths per 100,000 population.”

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post COVID-19 deaths in England and Wales was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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A time where ‘real world’ conferences are a memory of the past is a good opportunity to look at the wealth of material that has been put online instead. Here is one of my talks that has recently been put online. It’s a four-minute ‘Lightning talk’ given at last year’s Anniversary Annual Conference of the Global Young Academy. Lightning Talks are giving a brief overview of a topic aimed at a broader audience, and here I am – obviously – talking about mapping and cartograms: The talk gives a brief insight into how in human geography and other social sciences cartograms are increasingly used as an alternative approach to visualising quantitative data. It showcases some underlying geospatial methods and demonstrates how also environmental sciences can benefit from these mapping techniques for creating powerful visualisations of complex geographical data. While the results are very unusual depictions, these techniques have the power to provide novel perspectives of our planet and re-engage the audience with the underlying phenomena and processes in an entirely new way. This can be highly relevant in communicating science to the public as much as for our own understanding of the data that we are working with. Powerful visualisations are a valuable tool of re-connecting science to truth and reason in a global world.

The post Re-Enlightening Views of the World was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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The European Waste Framework Directive sets a target of 50 per cent of municipal waste to be prepared for reuse and recycling by 2020 in the European Union. With that year approaching, a look at the most recent European-wide statistics on waste generation and treatment published in 2017 shows the progress that countries have made across the continent in reaching this target.

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The cartogram shows each European country proportional to its overall municipal waste production with its respective recycling rate. While only a small number or EU member states had reached that target in these most recent statistics, the largest producers of waste have made considerable progress, resulting in EU-wide recycling rates having increased from 32 per cent in 2004 to 45 per cent in 2016. If non-EU countries are included, that figure lies at 31 per cent across the continent. Improvements have been made by reducing total amounts of waste as well as by increasing the quantities of recycled materials. Among the still more problematic areas remains the issue of plastic waste, of which less than a third is recycled and substantial amounts are being exported to countries outside the EU.

A modified version of this map was published in the January 2020 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post Waste and recycling in Europe was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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If the 2016 vote for Brexit was described as a political earthquake in the United Kingdom, then the 2019 General Election is the equivalent to the tsunami that followed this seismic event and swept over some of the deepest Labour heartlands in England. Political commentators spoke of a demolishment of the Labour party’s ‘red wall’ as the results came in (although the ‘wall’ that may have once stood had already started to crumble in previous elections). Approaching the outcome of the General Election from a visual perspective puts such metaphors into a visual representation. The following map shows the outcome of this year’s general election – the fourth (and definitely final) of this decade – in three different cartographic visualisations:

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Shown on the maps are the respective winning party in each area. The map series itself compares a conventional (land area) map to two different types of cartograms:
The hexagon cartogram in the middle is based on the idea of giving each constituency an equal representation in the map by using hexagon shapes for the constituencies. This gives a clearer picture of the composition of the new parliament, as the seats that were one determine the share of seats in Parliament, rather than a party’s proportional vote share.
The gridded population cartogram on the right hand side is using an equally distributed grid as a base and then resizes each grid cell according to the total number of people living in that space. Larger grid cells therefore show larger populations, while grid cells in the sparsely populated areas shrink accordingly. The last map gives the most honest picture when it comes to showing how people are represented politically (because constituencies have varying population sizes). It also allows comparing the more rural areas (with the smaller grid cells where the black lines almost converge) to the most densely populated regions (with the most blown up grid cells), seeing how rural versus urban voting compares in the country.

After considerable political deadlock, this election was also meant to lead to a decisive outcome around the issue of Brexit that has loomed over British politics ever since the 2016 EU referendum. With this being the second election since the referendum, a closer look at the changing political landscapes helps to better understand how this landslide victory for the Conservative Party emerged geographically. The following cartograms consider these changes through a more detailed look at how seats did (or did not) change hands:

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The different colours in this second map indicate where constituencies changed hands between the 2017 and 2019 election (using each candidate’s most recent political affiliation ahead of the election into account).
The map series itself compares a conventional map to two different types of cartograms:
The hexagon cartogram in the middle is based on the idea of giving each constituency an equal share in the map by using hexagon shapes for the constituencies. This gives a clearer picture of the composition of the new parliament, as the seats that were one determine the share of seats in Parliament, rather than a party’s proportional vote share.
The gridded population cartogram on the right hand side is using an equally distributed grid as a base and then resizes each grid cell according to the total number of people living in that space. Larger grid cells therefore show larger populations, while grid cells in the sparsely populated areas shrink accordingly. The last map gives the most honest picture when it comes to showing how people are represented politically (because constituencies have varying population sizes). It also allows comparing the more rural areas (with the smaller grid cells where the black lines almost converge) to the most densely populated regions (with the most blown up grid cells), seeing how rural versus urban voting compares in the country.

A full cartographic analysis of this year’s General Election can be found in my contribution to the UK Election Analysis 2019 published by the Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture & Community at Bournemouth University.

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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Cigarette smoking and other uses of tobacco are major contributors to preventable illness and death. A 2008 World Health Organization (WHO) report estimated that around 70 per cent of the adult male population in Russia was smoking. Another WHO study estimated that prevalence of smoking amongst women is about one fifth of that amongst men. Prevalence levels of daily smokers are generally lower.

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This map shows the population aged 15 years and over who are reporting to smoke every day based on a 2014 WHO study.
While global prevalence has not changed significantly in the past decades, overall numbers of smokers are even increasing due to growing populations. Therefore, the WHO introduced measures to reduce demand for tobacco products in order to support countries in their policy making. The “Enforce bans on tobacco advertising” measure is one of the key policies, because “tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship can make smoking more socially acceptable, impede efforts to educate people about the hazards of tobacco use, and strengthen the tobacco industry’s influence over media, porting and entertainment businesses” (WHO).
The map contains additional information on how far each country’s legislation is banning any forms of tobacco advertising promotion and sponsorship, giving an insight into how daily smoking prevalence in recent years relates to these policy measures. The measures shown here range from a “complete absence of ban, or ban that does not cover national television (TV), radio and print media”,
a “ban on national TV, radio and print media only”, a “ban on national TV, radio and print media as well as on some but not all other forms of direct and/or indirect advertising” to a “ban on all forms of advertising”.

A modified version of this map was published in the May 2019 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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This contribution for Political Insight (June 2019, Volume 10, Issue 2) maps gender inequality around the world and argues that the political sphere is often the most resistant to change. Unequal treatment based on gender is deeply embedded in many countries. Gender studies emerged as an important part of academic research in the 1980s. The issue of gender inequality also emerged on the global political agenda, albeit slowly. Gender-related measures became part of the Human Development Index (HDI) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

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In 2010, gender was eventually fully integrated in the Human Development Report (HDR) as the Gender Inequality Index (GII). Unlike the HDI, the GII is particularly aimed at exposing differences in achievements between women and men, and at measuring the human development costs of gender inequality. The higher the value of the index is, the greater are the disparities between females and males, and the greater the loss to human emancipation in general.
The GII captures disadvantages facing women and girls, and discrimination in health, education, political representation and the labour market. The GII measures reproductive health (maternal mortality, and adolescent birth rates), empowerment (proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males aged 25 and older with at least some secondary education) and economic status (women’s labour force participation).
A higher value of the UN Gender Inequality Index (GII) indicates greater gender inequality. While gender inequality remains a problem in the relatively more equal societies, it is a major barrier to human development in many developing states.
The worst performing nations are those in the two highest quintiles of the data (index values of 0.45 and above). As shown in the gender equality map, the highest inequalities are found in countries where a substantial part of the global population lives, most notably the African continent and South- and Southeast Asia. The EU average is 0.13, world average 0.45 and Arab States average 0.55.
Men may well suffer as well as women in countries that tolerate greater levels of gender inequality, with their partners more likely to die in childbirth, the male-dominated politics of the country being more aggressive, and men often expected to take on more traditional male roles rather than having greater flexibility. Gender inequality is also geographically more complex than such an index may suggest.

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Two examples taken from the GII demonstrate these varying spatial patterns, providing an insight into how gender inequality affects different aspects of society. The above two maps show the gender gaps in education and in the labour market as expressed through the ratio of females to males participating in both areas. The education map shows the ratio for the population aged 25 and above with at least some secondary education. South American countries, on average, have high levels of gender inequality but they also, as this map shows, have a high share of women participating in secondary education.
The labour market map shows the ratio for the population aged 15 and above participating in the labour force. Here large parts of the Arab world stand out with a female to male ratio of below 0.5, meaning that more than two men for every woman are participating in the labour market (up to 5.9:1 in Yemen). At the same time, these are not the most unequal countries according to the index.
These two examples show the complexity of gender inequality and that achieving change requires more than just addressing single issues. Global efforts to achieve change include the inclusion of gender equality in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) where goal five aims to ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ by 2030.

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Accomplishing the goal of gender equality requires leadership and political action. Yet politics is one of the fields where gender inequality is a major problem. Political participation of women remains overall low, and across the world the number of women in leadership positions is low.
In June 2019, just 11 women were serving as head of state and 12 as head of government (before Theresa May resigned in the UK) according to United Nations statistics. The same UN data states only 20.7 per cent of government ministers were women, often with very particular portfolios such as environment, natural resources, and energy, followed by social sectors, such as social affairs, education and the family.
The map of the gender gap in politics shows the 2018 GII data for political representation of women in parliaments worldwide measured by their share of seats in parliament. The Sustainable Development Goals call for ‘women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life’.
Full and effective participation in political life is highly underperforming at a global level, if an approximate equal participation is seen as a desirable outcome. In November 2018, 24 per cent of all national parliamentarians were women. While this still is a relatively low figure, it marks an increase up from 11.3 per cent in 1995. The underlying spatial patterns of the gender gap in politics provide a varying geographical picture. Europe (27.7 per cent) and especially the Nordic countries (42.3 per cent) had the overall highest regional shares of women in parliament. At the same time, there were 29 countries where women accounted for less than ten per cent of parliamentarians and four where no women were represented at all. Only three countries had more than 50 per cent female representation in parliament, Rwanda (61.3 per cent), Cuba (53.2 per cent) and Bolivia (53.1 per cent).
These diverse patterns demonstrate that gender inequality has complex patterns. Political and other forms of empowerment have often proven to be an important step in changing the societal norms that sustain these imbalances. But while these contextual factors have been widely described, Celis and Lovenduski (2018) argue that gender equality needs to be analysed as a power struggle and that such empirical – hence descriptive – studies need to investigate the underlying mechanisms that block the achievement of gender equality.

Bibliographic details for the original publication that this blog entry is based on:

• Hennig, B.D. (2019). In Focus: Inequalities of Gender: Education, work, and politics Political Insight 10 (2): 20-21.
  DOI 10.1177/2041905819854312 (Sage)

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The post Inequalities of Gender: Education, work, and politics was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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Recent research shows that increasing shortages in honeybees threaten pollination of crops in Europe. Although according to a study covering 41 European countries the overall number of honeybee stocks has increased by 7 per cent between 2005 and 2010 (to an estimated 13.4 million colonies with 7 billion honeybees), 15 countries have also experienced declines ranging from 4 per cent in Slovenia to 47 per cent in Switzerland. At the same time have changes in agricultural practices led to considerable changes in the need for pollination. Increases in pollinated crop areas are contributed to the growth of areas for producing biofuel crops (oilseed rape, sunflower and soybean), as have the use of pesticides led to a decline in the number of bees.

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This map series demonstrates the links between supply density of honeybees and the number of colonies required to provide pollination services to pollinate crop areas. It can be seen that the supply of honeybees relative to the national demand varies considerably between European countries. Of all countries included in the survey, the United Kingdom’s shortage in honeybees is only surpassed by Moldova, making the need for habitat protection a critical task not only for changes in environmental but also in agricultural policies.

A modified version of this map was published in the January 2019 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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This year July, 29th is Earth Overshoot Day: “Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources (fish and forests, for instance) and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. We maintain this deficit by liquidating stocks of resources and accumulating waste, primarily carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Earth’s ability to sustain humanity’s existence is linked to the planet’s productivity and its biological capacity. In the wider sense, this does not only refer to the resources that humans consume, but also nature’s capability to absorb and regenerate the waste that we produce. With a still growing population as well as an increasing use of natural resources, biocapacity is under constant pressure. On a sustainable planet, all of humanity would only use the resources and produces waste at a level that does not deplete nature.

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The ecological footprint has been established as a measure to quantify humanity’s impact on the natural environment. It is calculated by estimating the carrying capacity of the natural environment and comparing this to the levels of consumption and waste. It is measured in global hectares (gha) for the average biological productivity in a given year, currently at approximately 12 billion hectares (varying slightly between years). The ecological footprint then allows to put the actual global hectares that are consumed (and wasted) into the context of the existing biocapacity. A sustainable word would need an average ecological footprint of currently 1.72 gha. With changing consumption patterns and population developments, the gap between these two has growing constantly and exceeds the biosphere’s regenerative capacity. This map shows the extent to which countries overuse the world’s natural resources, colour coded by multiples of the carrying capacity of the planet.

A modified version of this map was published in the November 2018 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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You might have been wondering why there are so few new cartograms appearing on this blog. Just to reassure you, this blog is not dead. But I will now use it more for other things than before, such as ‘normal’ map outputs from my work and other bits and pieces from my academic research. Much of the cartograms, however, can now be found on the Worldmapper website at Worldmapper.org which we relaunched at the 125th Anniversary Conference of the Geographical Association in Sheffield in 2018 (read more about it here). The Worldmapper website now also has its own Worldmapper blog where I will put some of the work online that would previously have appeared on the Views of the World blog. And I have also become involved in the (currently German-only) Riff Reporter platform where you will find some of our Worldmapper works in context in the AnthropoScene section. You see, my cartogram work has not vanished, and there is more than ever out there! It has simply moved to other places on the internet which you should follow in addition to this blog. But don’t leave just yet, new maps and other related works will continue to be featured here! You will always hear about it first, if you follow @geoviews and @worldmapper on Twitter.

And here is a talk that I gave at the Material conference, saying a few words about the new Worldmapper website:

The post Where have all the cartograms gone? was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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Commentators have suggested that the Commonwealth could become more important for UK trade after Brexit. This article for Political Insight (June 2018, Volume 9, Issue 2) maps the current state of British-Commonwealth trade and finds a more mixed picture of UK-Commonwealth trade relations.The Commonwealth of Nations (hereafter referred to as the Commonwealth) has received increased levels of interest in the United Kingdom in the runup to and even more so since the vote for leaving the European Union in 2016. As an intergovernmental organisation working based on consensus and with very limited institutionalised structures, it constitutes a very loose and uncommitted association of its 53 member states. In this regard it is an almost opposite model to the European Union with its increasingly complex intertwined structures that bind the member states together.

The rekindled interest in the Commonwealth was outlined by Theresa May in her Lancaster House speech in early 2017, where she made these direct links between the government’s Brexit plans and the narrative of a ‘Global Britain’ with the Commonwealth being ‘a reminder of [Britain’s] unique and proud global relationships’. While a 2009 survey across major Commonwealth nations conducted by the Royal Commonwealth Society showed a largely ignorant attitude towards the organisation and its future, it was mostly the smaller and developing or emerging economies that showed (relatively) higher levels of support.
The economic argument appears to be the major driver in this government rhetoric about the relevance of the Commonwealth. It appears almost like a revealing acknowledgement of the importance of some form of institutionalised collaboration of nations in a globalised world to retain economic and political significance.

With its historic roots the Commonwealth provides the UK with a platform where British identity is highly present – arguably much more than it has ever been in the EU – while also having a certain established global relevance through its geographical dispersion and other key characteristics. These include the large number of members (53), a large share of the world’s population (2.4 billion) and the member states’ combined economic size (depending on the measure accounting for approximately 15% of global GDP). This makes the Commonwealth an attractive institution to turn towards from a British perspective.

These overall statistics must be relativized though, since they give a distorted picture of the more disparate realities. By population, India weighs heavily, a large share of the countries are small island nations, and the levels of economic development range from Malawi’s per capita GDP of U$ 326 to Australia with over 56,000 U$ per capita. In terms of economic power, India is set to surpass the UK’s total GDP in 2020.

When looking more specifically at the UK’s trade relationships with its Commonwealth partners, an almost constant rise in overall trade of goods and services could be observed in the decade from 2000 to 2010, after which both exports and imports went down again slightly. In 2011 the UK reached a small positive trade balance in its trade with the Commonwealth for the first time in the period since 2000. In relative terms, exports accounted for 8.9% and imports for 7.8% of the total trade in goods and services. Exports are therefore at a similar share as it was at the start of the century, while imports went down slightly resulting in this recent positive trade balance.

As a House of Commons Library Briefing noted, exports to the Commonwealth are at similar levels as exports to Germany, and imports are at levels that compare to those from China. Therefore, trade with the Commonwealth can be regarded as relatively low compared to that with the EU (43.1% of exports in 2016, 54.9% of imports).

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Understanding trade with the Commonwealth also requires further geographical differentiation. UK exports to the Commonwealth are concentrated of few countries that are more heavily traded with, as shown in the cartogram that shows the quantitative dimension and the relative shares of UK exports and the Commonwealth trading partners.
This picture of trade becomes even more disparate when looking at the trade balances as shown in the pair of cartograms on UK-Commonwealth trade that show the distribution of individual surplus and deficit in trade relationships. While there has been a modest overall Commonwealth trade surplus in recent years, this is largely dependent on trade with few countries, such as Australia, Singapore, and Canada, which account for ¾ of the overall trade surplus. At the same time does the deficit in trade with India alone account for more than 45% of the negative trade balance with Commonwealth countries that the UK has a trade deficit with.

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The positive balance of trade relationships is heavily dependent on trade with wealthier Commonwealth countries. In contrast, some of the most important developing and emerging economies especially in South Asia are benefiting more from trade with the UK than the other way around.

Treating the Commonwealth as a homogenous and coherent block that provides opportunities for future trade relationships therefore must be seen with caution. This is not only because of the political limitations of building a more consistent relationship between these geographically widespread countries, but also because of the heterogeneity of the existing trading patterns within the Commonwealth that these figures demonstrate.

From a political perspective, the relevance of the Commonwealth for the UK’s global engagement may increase out of necessity. At the same time do many of the Commonwealth nations participate in other regional projects of integration, such as the EU (that Malta and Cyprus continue being members of), the Caribbean Community, Southern African Customs Union, East African Community, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation that some of the Commonwealth nations engage in. This therefore speaks more for a continuation of the organisation’s role as a loose non-legally binding platform that collaborates more on a number of societal levels. An increased political or economic integration as a replacement for the UK’s membership of the EU appears a very unlikely prospect at the moment.

The formal decision to agree on Prince Charles being the next head of the Commonwealth of Nations is not least one further symbolic sign of the organisation’s slow pace of moving on from being a construct that emerged from the decolonisation of the British Empire. A growing confidence of its emerging powers, such as India, would need to be the first step to changing the functioning of the Commonwealth towards a more balanced but at the same time more relevant voice in the global cobweb of intergovernmental organisations.

Bibliographic details for the original publication that this blog entry is based on:

• Hennig, B.D. (2018). In Focus: Could Brexit be a Boon for British trade with the Commonwealth? Political Insight 9 (2): 24-25.
  DOI 10.1177/2041905818779330 (Sage)

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Approximately half the population of Germany lives in the 30 major urban German agglomerations, such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich (München), and Cologne (Köln) but also in smaller cities including Münster, Freiburg, Leipzig, and Dresden. These urban regions (Stadtregionen) are also major analytical units of the Federal institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) within the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning that advises the Federal Government in the fields of spatial planning, urban development, housing and building. Therefore, these regions that cover approximately 32 per cent of the built-up area used for settlement or transport infrastructure are of particular interest in understanding urban dynamics in Germany in a regional and national context (Baumgart et al, 2016).

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The maps presented here are part of an analysis made using advanced methods of geovisualisation to aid a better understanding of recent trends in urban development. The maps are using two different approaches to cartogram techniques that focus on showing the population changes that occurred in these agglomerations. Cartograms are an increasingly used alternative to conventional maps. Recent advances have made these maps more versatile and suitable for advanced analytical purposes Tobler (2004). This work utilises the diffusion-based method for producing density-equalising maps by Gastner & Newman (2004) and further advances in their approach developed by Hennig (2013).
The main map is a gridded cartogram in which equally-sized grid cells are resized according to number of people living there. This transformation includes the entire area of Germany where the most densely populated regions are increased in size proportional to their populations and more sparsely populated rural areas are much smaller than they appear on a land area map. This allows additional spatial information such as socio-demographic data to be shown in their relation to population, such as the colours in this map are visualising the relative annual population changes that occurred in the major urban agglomerations between 2008 and 2013.
The two complementing maps are density-equalising cartograms in which only the major urban agglomerations are transformed while the surrounding administrative regions are shown for orientation only. These cartograms are depicting growth and decline which they show in two separate maps that highlight the quantitative extent of these changes. Each urban is present in only one of the two cartograms, indicating that it was either subject to an increase or a loss of population this time period. By using such novel visualisations dynamic changes, such as shifting populations, can be analysed in their spatial as well as their human context.
Examination of the average annual change in the populations of the selected urban agglomerations highlights the regional differences in these trends. Contrary to the national population decline of the past 30 years, which is predicted to slow down or reverse in future, 26 out of the 30 major agglomerations show population growth between 2008 and 2013. In 25 of these areas population growth in the city centre is even higher than in its respective suburban area. This can be seen as evidence of a very recent trend of re-urbanisation in these places.
One particularly notable trend is the dynamics in smaller cities such as Freiburg and Münster, as well as Dresden and Leipzig in east Germany. In addition to high rates of re-urbanisation, the suburban areas often have stagnating or even declining populations.
The Ruhr area agglomerations are distinctively different from the other areas described in the overall summary of trends. The stagnating populations in the centres of Dortmund and Essen are complemented by considerably declining populations in their surrounding areas.
The smaller pair of cartograms helps to understand that population decline in the settlements in the Ruhr area that is larger than in all other urban agglomerations put together. Growth, in contrast, is spatially spread much more evenly.
Amongst the influencing factors or growth and decline are developments in social structures, employment as well as changes in land development in these regions. How these factors are interconnected and influence each other is part of further research towards a long-term geomonitoring of these regions in order to better understand these new forms of urbanisation in Germany (Baumgart et al, 2016).

References:
Baumgart C, Kaup S, Osterhage F, et al (2016) Monitoring StadtRegionen. In: Othengrafen F, Schmidt-Lauber B, Hannemann C., et al (eds) Jahrbuch StadtRegion 2015/16. Leverkusen-Opladen: Budrich, pp.219–264. DOI: 10.3224/jbsr.v9i1.12
Gastner M and Newman M (2004) Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101: 7499–7504. DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0400280101
Hennig BD (2013) Rediscovering the world: Map transformations of human and physical space. Heidelberg: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34848-8
Tobler W (2004) Thirty-five years of computer cartograms. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 94 (1): pp.58–73. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.09401004.x
Additional data source:
Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder (2015) Ergebnisse des Zensus 2011, Bevölkerung im 100 Meter-Gitter (accessed 1 July 2018).

Bibliographic details for the original publication that this blog entry is based on:

• Hennig, B.D. (2018): The growth and decline of urban agglomerations in Germany. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. DOI:10.1177/2F0308518X18798835

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“The right to asylum shall be guaranteed with due respect for the rules of the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol of 31 January 1967 relating to the status of refugees and in accordance with the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.” Article 18 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights outlines the European Union’s legal framework for its asylum policies that have come under intense scrutiny and political pressure since the height of the significant number of refugees trying to literally reach the shores of the continent from conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East. While refugee numbers went down again to pre-2015 levels and below due to considerable political interventions, the political debate has not disappeared and continues to heavily influence European politics including major shifts towards the right end of the political spectrum in many member states. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (September 2018, Volume 9, Issue 3) I looked at recent developments in Europe’s “refugee crisis”.
The conflicting interests between national politics and the aims to a joint political approach towards the issue at EU level are part of the problems that have partly contributed to the continuing challenges. The Dublin Regulation according to which the country of entry is responsible for handling the process of an asylum application proofed difficult for the member states that due to their geographic location at the Mediterranean Sea were facing the majority of arrivals of refugees from the neighbouring conflict regions in recent years.

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The smaller cartograms in the graphic demonstrate how according to UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) estimates mostly Greece, Italy and Spain were the main destinations of Mediterranean sea arrivals in the past five years (2018 shows figures for the first half of the year). During the height of the so-called ‘Refugee crisis’ in 2015/16 Greece became a major destination (856,723 arrivals in 2016), while Italy showed consistently high numbers of arrivals in the tens of thousands and Spain seeing a significant increase in 2017 and 2018.
These shifting patterns reflect political interventions which are often a response to pressures from national-level politics. The events in 2015/16 saw an agreement between the EU and Turkey to stop the crossings towards Greece, while subsequently a more hard-line approach by Italy led to routes shifting towards the Spanish shores as well as the Spanish exclaves on the African continent.
The overall toughened response also resulted in refugees taking ever more dangerous routes which explains why, despite declining overall numbers, the number of dead or missing people stays in the thousands and was consistently rising as a share of refugees between 2015 and 2018.
The European-wide efforts to secure the outer borders have led to an increased perception (and reality) of a ‘fortress Europe’. The Dublin Regulation aimed to find a joint EU approach proved unworkable not least due to the lack of solidarity that it contains. Western and Northern European countries are the least likely countries of arrival for asylum seekers, while they are populous and equally important prosperous member states. Southern European economies, in contrast, are still recovering from the impact of the economic crisis. Being responsible for arrivals of hundreds of thousands of refugees is an enormous challenge which puts considerable pressure on many small communities that were the first point of arrival, such as Greek islands in the Aegean. While these communities responded with a huge amount of solidarity and effort, the symbolic images of refugee camps helped to feed a European-wide narrative of the political right that refugees and asylum seekers are a burden rather than a vulnerable group of people that have the right of protection according to international conventions.
In addition to a fortification of the outer borders, individual states have increased efforts to secure their own national borders through increased controls leading to the ongoing fragmentation instead of a joint responsibility for these most vulnerable group of international migrants (though the political rhetoric in recent years has often blurred the boundaries between forced and voluntary migration).
The current number of asylum applications across Europe demonstrates the highly unequal distribution of applications, not only in absolute numbers but also in relative terms when comparing this to the overall distribution of people as shown in the main maps of the graphics. According to the Dublin agreement asylum applications can be deferred back to the point of entry, while agreements to allocate asylum seekers across the participating states have so far not lead to an equal number of applicants per country. Of the then most populous countries in Europe, Greece continues to have the highest number of applications (5.3), while most other countries apart from very small states receive around 2 applications per 1,000 people. All Central and Eastern European countries remain just at or far below the 0.5 mark in the statistics.
In addition to these statistics it also needs to be kept in mind that these numbers do not reflect the number of asylum seekers that will end up living in these countries, as these are not approved applications. Here the difficulty of individual countries in handling the bureaucratic process becomes even more evident: In 2017 Germany, who received the largest number of applications, made final decisions on approximately 30,000 cases (granted or rejected), while the Mediterranean countries were hardly able to process a fraction of their applications (Greece 500, Italy 385, Spain 10). A European-wide approach seems inevitable.
Finding a fair system of allocating refugees across the states remains a major challenge in European politics. Times of crisis, just as it was the case in economic difficult times some years ago, do not provide the basis for finding consensus demonstrating solidarity between governments. At the same time do critical situations like these demonstrate the weakness of a lack of consistent policies and the problems that often arise when European-wide solutions always only work with the least-common denominator that all member states can agree on. Whether the principle of consensus can continue to guide EU politics, or whether making more difficult decisions through qualified majorities are necessary to keep the Union functioning, remains to be seen. The approach towards asylum seekers and refugees has yet again demonstrated that at the moment national interests stand above European solidarity which had led to Europe becoming the fortress that it is at the moment. A debate about solutions for better integrating refugees in European societies as well as tackling the underlying causes in the countries of origin must return to the centre of politics, rather than the current discussion about preventing refugee flows reaching the continent.

Will politics be able to overcome these current divisions? Against this stands a substantial number of volunteers from the civic society across Europe who exercise the Union of peace, solidarity and democracy that the founding principles of the Treaty of Rome advocated.

Bibliographic details for the original publication that this blog entry is based on:

• Hennig, B.D. (2018). In Focus: Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’. Political Insight 9 (3): 20-21.
  Article online (Sage)

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2018 has seen the new Worldmapper come to light, which is also why this blog has become a bit more quiet in recent months. This year’s Christmas greetings show a collage of the 569 new maps that we have published on Worldmapper since its launch in April:
With this, wishing you peace, love, and happiness for the holidays.
Keep mapping…

The post A Year Of Maps was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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Due to its distinct geologic conditions for their formations, the occurrence of diamonds is confined to around 35 countries in the world. While countries such as Australia, India, or Canada focus more on mining industrial diamonds, African countries such as Botswana and South Africa are better known for their production of gem diamonds. Diamond mining activities in many African countries are often also linked to conflicts and controversial human rights conditions.
According to data collected by the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), which covers an about 99.8 per cent of global diamond production, 134 million carats of diamonds worth US$ 12.4 billion were produced in 2016. This most recent figure is slightly up from the average annual production since the start of the financial crisis in 2008.

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Volume and value of diamond production vary between countries. However, the overall picture where diamonds are mined remains similar at a global level. The above cartogram shows the countries of the world resized according to the total diamond production by volume. Southern and Central Africa dominate the global picture as a diamond producing region, while Russia is the largest single producing country. Other major producers are Canada and Australia.
The cartogram also shows additional information about the location of mines collected in the first comprehensive global database of diamonds. The database was compiled with support of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) to better understand the role of diamonds in armed civil conflicts, such as in Sierra Leone and Angola where diamonds are used to finance wars.
The locations of mines shown on the cartogram also reveals areas which currently have little production and are therefore hardly visible in the distorted map. Especially Brazil stands out: As one of the very first countries where diamonds were mined as early as the 1700s, it now contributes less than 1 per cent of the world’s production but has a large accumulation of old mines (and the necessary resources) that provide potential for a revival in diamond mining.

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The global picture of diamond trade shows that commercial activity and the redistribution of the finished luxury or industrial products takes place in very different parts of the world: These are usually not the producing countries that are shown in the country cartogram of diamond production.
The circular cartogram shows all countries that import diamonds in the value of US$ 500 million and above. All countries importing diamonds over US$ 1 billion are shown with their import value. As the proportional circles show, North America, Europa (via Belgium) the Middle East, and Asia (via Hong Kong and India) are the major hubs in the global diamond trade, while diamond producing countries play next to no role in these networks.
These cartograms highlight the controversial role of highly valuable mineral resources and financial investment and trading activities. While diamonds are largely found in the poorest (and sometimes conflict-ridden) regions of the planet, their role as an investment in economically unstable times on the global markets shapes some the most prosperous hubs of the financial world as a sign of wealth and prosperity.

A modified version of this map was published in the April 2018 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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How are the EU member nations faring in the fight for gender equality? It is a complex task to measure the progress that has been made in achieving equal gender rights. The Sustainable Development Goals provide a framework for the global level that is targeted at the most pressing issues of gender based discrimination. In addition to that, national governments as well as trans-national organisations such as the European Union have started concerted efforts to better understanding progress that is made in the different areas that relate to gender equality. This is often linked to developing new policies that aim to improve the situation in the different areas where gender issues matter.
The European Institute for Gender Equality has developed a Gender Equality Index that provides a measure for comparing member states over time in a range of areas relevant to European policymaking. The advantage of using an index is the possibility to use a single measure to monitor and track overall progress between the different countries. The combination of different indicators therefore does not prioritise a single issue of gender rights, but aims to support overall progress as an integrated challenge for achieving real change in thinking.

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The cartogram shows the state of progress that has been made by the 28 EU member states visualised on a population cartogram. 0 indicates total inequality in all areas, while an index value of 100 stands for full equality. In the most recent study, the EU-28 achieved an overall score of 52.9 with slow (but continuing) increases compared to the previous releases of the Index in 2005 and 2010. The index combines the areas of work, money, knowledge, time, power, and health, and also takes intersecting inequalities and violence into account.
The population cartogram shows that the countries with the highest progress are those with relatively small populations. Sweden currently is highest with an overall score of 74.2 (slightly down from its 74.4 score in 2010). The cartogram also shows there are distinct geographic patterns to gender equality across the European Union, with the southern and eastern countries currently scoring worst. Romania is at the bottom with a score of 33.7 (down from 35.0), showing how these patterns that are emerging in the map are quite persistent and requiring considerably political efforts to change.

A modified version of this map was published in the November 2017 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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There are approximately 7,000 languages believed to be spoken around the world. Despite this diversity, the majority of the world’s population speaks only a fraction of these languages. The three largest language groups (Mandarin, Spanish, and English) are spoken by more than 1.5 billion people. Other estimates state that 2/3 of the world’s population share only 12 languages.
But it is the diversity of the languages spoken by the few that makes language a remarkable cultural phenomenon. It is estimated that about 96 per cent of the languages are spoken by only 3 to 4 per cent of the people. 2,000 of the world’s languages have less than 1,000 native speakers.

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There are many attempts to understand and map this diversity of languages around the world. The Ethnologue database as one of the most comprehensive projects lists exactly 7,099 individual languages in a comprehensive geographic database that many of the above-mentioned statistics are based upon. An even more detailed account when looking at the real diversity of language provides Glottolog of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. Glottolog “aims to provide complete references on the world’s languages”. It also looks at the distribution of dialects and consists of almost 8,500 entries. Besides detailed linguistic information, this database includes basic geographic information about the origins of languages, their families and their dialects.
The Glottolog database was used in this cartogram feature to highlight the geographic distribution of language diversity around the world. The main locations of each entry from the database were used to calculate the density (and diversity) of languages in their spatial distribution. The cartogram therefore shows larger areas where there is a relatively higher diversity of languages. This is also reflected in the differently shaded colours that are overlaid.
The highest language diversity in the world can be found in Africa and Asia, both with more than 2,000 living languages. On the other end of the geographic spectrum lies Europe with only around 250 living languages and dialects spoken there.
How vulnerable languages are can be seen even in Europe with its relatively low language diversity. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level lists 11 languages in the United Kingdom alone that have a certain degree of endangerment. Most critically endangered are Cornish and Manx on the Isle of Man, two of 14 languages in Europe with this most severe status. Both languages are now subject to a certain extent of revival efforts.
The authors of the Handbook of Endangered Languages estimate that by the end of the century 50 to 90 per cent of the currently spoken languages could be extinct. First affected will be the approximately 500 nearly extinct languages that often only have a few (sometimes even only one) known speakers left. Endangered languages face similar fates as endangered species in nature.
Such highly endangered languages include the Bishuo language in Cameroon for which there was only one known native speaker left in the last records. In North America, many of the nearly extinct languages are to be found among the native populations along the west coast. One example is the Klallam language, for which there were still 5 speakers recorded in the 1990 Census. It now is regarded as extinct with its last native speaker having died in 2014, although a few second language speakers remain.
Projects like the Endangered Languages Project aim to utilise the internet in their efforts to raise awareness for endangered languages and work towards the future preservation of today’s language diversity.

A modified version of this map was published in the June 2017 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

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Waldo Tobler is dead. He is most remembered for his affable manner, his very kindly smile, the remarkable longevity of this academic life, his great academic achievements and – much more importantly – for being very kind, especially to strangers. A generation of scholars who received his collected works on floppy disc (later on CD) is evidence for his commitment to engage with other scholars. He made no distinction between the hierarchies in academia and gave young scholars the same respect and attention as senior academics, acting as a mentor and source of inspiration to many of them. Understanding and discovery were his real aspirations.
His most simple of discoveries are most often quoted, ‘Tobler’s law’ and ‘Tobler’s walking rule’, but behind such simplistic truisms, there was a mind that was constantly producing ideas that others, including the vast majority of his colleagues, rarely understood at the time. It is lucky he was such a patient man or else he could have become exasperated.
One of Waldo’s earliest papers was entitled ‘Automation and cartography’ and was published in the Geographical Review (Tobler, 1959). He was at the forefront years before his contemporaries, but his great modesty meant that few initially noticed – and none resented. Through the 1960s he quietly produced what would become seminal papers, the first on computer animation, on medieval mapping, on the mathematics of mapping and on filters and the inverses (in Geographical Analysis) – touching on what we now know as spatial smoothing and sharpening – and about the methodology behind everything from optical character reading to, eventually, automated face recognition. He began all this with a wonderful PhD thesis on map transformations (Tobler, 1961). Waldo did modern cartograms first, and the way they are still made today is essentially his method; admittedly with a few very clever tweaks that speed things up considerably and mean that we are on the verge of real-time complex map transformation; when any map morphs in any way you want, as you watch it.
With most inventors, it is possible to say that if they had not done it someone else would have stepped in shortly afterwards and filled their boots, or even that someone else was actually inventing the same things at the very same time because it was actually the next obvious step to take. You cannot say that about Tobler. There was no one else at the same time doing anything at all similar and many of his ideas remain to this day to still be taken forward because they are still too innovative for our times. Waldo operated as if he had come from the future. His ideas about the (imaginary still to be visualized economic) winds that move migrants around the USA and the transformation of time to morph it into space have not yet been taken very far forwards. In 1971 he was one of the first, and possibly still the only, human geographer to have a paper published in Nature on archaeology (Tobler and Wineburg, 1971).
Tobler’s most productive year was 1973. In a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that year he showed how the districting problem of the USA, and anywhere else in the world, could be solved (Tobler, 1973a). This was done by simply putting a hexagonal grid over an equal population density map and then re-projecting those hexagons back into real space to create a set of districts that fairly defined each of equal population. Imagine if his ideas had been taken up – no more gerrymandering in US politics! In Geographical Analysis that year he demonstrated completely new forms of mapping (Tobler, 1973b). And in a collected work, he explained how the geometry of our imagined mental maps could be better understood (Tobler, 1973c). And then, for a further five decades he just carried on publishing. Keith Clarke has written about this later period in his obituary of Waldo published in CaGIS (Clarke, 2018).
We have said very little about his family and friends, about where he came from and much about what he was like. It was a beautiful sunny spring afternoon in March 2016 that one of the authors last met Waldo in the modest house a ten-minute drive away from UCSB’s campus where he and his wife Rachel lived. Under the citrus trees in his garden, his mind was sharp as ever, passionately discussing his ongoing appetite for advancing cartogram techniques and going into minute details of the underlying maths. And yet he had a very genuine personal side that he was willing to share with people around him. Speaking about his Swiss roots, his life in the US and his travels leaves a memory of him with a warm smile on that March afternoon. Here, at his home, he was the most modest and down-to-earth person who showed his greatest appreciation of the little things in life, such as the birds buzzing around the citrus trees. His curiosity to engage with the world around him was never-ending. For those who want to know more about the most unusual geographer, Sandy Thoits has written more about his private and personal side in the local Noozhawk newspaper (Thoits, 2018).
We have written this note to point out that his genius was well recognized in Europe and hope that the points we make lead to some research students out there – just starting off – to go back to those original 1970s papers and draw up the new boundaries of the USA that future elections should be held on, to determine the economic winds that blow migrants into, across and out of the USA – their strength and direction, and then the change in that human climate over time; and to look into where Waldo only just began to look, at the mapping of time and space brought together.

References:
Clarke, K.C. (2018) “Obituary: Waldo R. Tobler (1930–2018)” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 45 (4) pp.287–288.
Tobler, W.R. (1959) “Automation and cartography” Geographical Review 49 (4) pp.526–534.
Tobler, W.R. (1961) “Map transformations of geographic space” (PhD thesis) University of Washington.
Tobler, W.R. (1973a) “A continuous transformation useful for districting” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 219 (1) pp.215–220.
Tobler, W.R. (1973b) “Choropleth maps without class intervals?” Geographical Analysis 5 (3) pp.262–265.
Tobler, W.R. (1973c) “The Geometry of Mental Maps” In Golledge, R. and Rushton, G. (Eds.) Essays on the Multidimensional Analysis of Perceptions and Preferences Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, pp.69–81.
Tobler, W. and Wineburg, S. (1971) “A Cappadocian speculation” Nature 231 pp.39–41.
Thoits, S. (2018) “Waldo R. Tobler of Santa Barbara, 1930–2018” Obituaries Noozhawk News 5 March 2018 Available at: www.noozhawk.com/article/ waldo_r._tobler_of_santa_barbara_1930_2018 (Accessed: 27th July 2018).

This text is based on the obituary co-written with Danny Dorling:
Danny Dorling & Benjamin Hennig (2018) Waldo Tobler: Remembering a genius, The Cartographic Journal, 55:3, 303-304, DOI: 10.1080/00087041.2018.1507181

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A deeper understanding and better communication of earthquake risk has been a major challenge in geosciences for a long time. The Global Earthquake Model initiative aims to become the world’s most complete source of earthquake risk resources and works towards a globally accepted standard for risk assessment. As part of this collaborative initiative, the EU-funded SHARE (‘Seismic Hazard Harmonization in Europe’) project helped in generating the first consistent regional seismic hazard model for Europe (including Turkey). The model, published in 2013, overcomes the limitation of national borders and includes a thorough quantification of the uncertainties.
Seismic hazard data collected for this model consisted of records from more than 30,000 earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.5 and above on the Richter scale which occurred since the year 1000, as shown in the smaller map in this feature. To fully consider that hazards do not only reflect the mere occurrence of major seismic events, but also the damage they create, the model also factors in the earthquakes’ damaging effects. Moderate earthquakes in very densely populated regions can have a major impact. The vulnerability of populations depends on a multitude of factors that go beyond the actual earthquake’s magnitude.

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The cartogram shows the spatial variation of seismic hazard in Europe derived from the SHARE model. It highlights the most vulnerable regions by resizing each area according to its so-called Peak Ground Acceleration. The data depicts the 10 per cent ‘exceedance probability’ that a peak ground acceleration of a certain fraction of the gravitational acceleration is observed within the next 50 years. It is therefore a depiction of the ground motions and consequently the related seismic hazard in each area. The colour key categorises these values according to their relative hazard.
The spatial patterns of largest seismic hazards in Europe mostly follow tectonic fault lines. These range from Iceland in the northwest of Europe, situated on the Mid-Atlantic-Ridge, to the North Anatolian Fault zone in Turkey in the southeast. The Balkan and Mediterranean countries, as well as Turkey, with their much denser populations living in regions at high risk, have a long history of destructive and deadly earthquakes. More remote areas, such as Iceland’s highly active and hazardous seismic zone, leave much smaller populations vulnerable to the danger; a strong earthquake here in 1784 (an estimated magnitude of 7.2Mw) caused severe damage to farmhouses and killed three people. In contrast, the first in a series of recent earthquakes in central Italy in August 2016 (magnitude 6.2Mw) led to 299 deaths and caused severe damage to a whole town, leaving 4,500 people homeless. Other earthquakes in Southern Europe and Turkey have cost thousands of lives in the past.
Interdisciplinary and trans-national research on both seismic hazards and a deeper understanding of the links between hazard and risk are important elements in mitigating earthquake damages and reducing the danger for affected populations living in these most hazardous regions.

A modified version of this map was published in the March 2017 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post Danger Zones: Mapping Europe’s Earthquakes was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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Mining may have been one contributing factors to why Australia as one of the few advanced economies did not go into recession following the global financial crisis 10 years ago. While mining is a profitable business in Australia, once the mines are no longer profitable, they are often abandoned leaving a scarred landscape and sometimes dying communities behind. A dataset by the Queensland regional government has records of almost 15,000 abandoned mines in the state. The following map gives an overview of their distribution:

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While there are programmes such as the “Abandoned Mine Lands Program (AMLP)” to address health and safety risks of these sites, an increased public awareness of the legacy of mining leads to calls for more political action and corporate responsibility to mitigate impacts of mining on communities and the environment remain.

A modified version of this map was published in the July 2017 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post The Holey Land: Abandoned Mines in Queensland / Australia was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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You may have noticed a slowdown in updates here on my website. I have been putting a lot of effort into the new Worldmapper website in recent months (check it out, it also has its own cartogram blog). Since Views of the World as well as Worldmapper are spare time projects and not my ‘real’ work, this website here gets a bit less attention, though I have not entirely abandoned it. Make sure to visit again, I will most definitely continue to post updates here as well that don’t fit in what we are doing over on Worldmapper. And also visit Worldmapper, we have a lot of exciting things lined up there!
All the latest stuff that I am up to can also be followed on Twitter: @geoviews

P.S.: Just so that you know what stuff in going on at Worldmapper, here is a recent map showing the heartbeat of nature (as produced by the terrestrial biosphere).

The post Have I got news for you was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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Football is a truly global phenomenon. Statistics about the real support are problematic, but there are estimates of up to 3.5 billion fans of football globally. A study conducted in 2006 by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which represents 211 members as the global governing body of football, estimated 270 million people being active in football worldwide. FIFA’s data give a rough idea of the global importance and global distribution of the phenomenon football, even if the numbers will have changed since this study was conducted.
From the statistics published, Asia emerged as the biggest player with 85 million footballers (Europe 62, Africa 46, North- and Central America with the Caribbean 43, South America 27, and Oceania 0.5 million). In terms of population share, Europe, South America and North/Central America with the Caribbean are ahead of other regions with about 7 per cent of their respective populations.
European football remains the most relevant globally, when it comes to the revenue of its national sports leagues. England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France (with Monaco) have the most profitable football leagues in the world. This makes the European administrative body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) the perhaps most important of the six continental confederations that are part of FIFA.
UEFA consists of 55 national members, which in part are also on the Asian continent. According to their 2016 report, 20344 players were participating in UEFA competitions back then. Here, geography plays an important role in understanding the global dynamics of football. European football leagues see significant inner-European flows of talents into the most prestigious leagues. But being such an important player internationally, 1374 international players from outside the UEFA countries compete in UEFA tournaments. In comparison, the largest single national representation from within Europe is that of Spain with 865 players. It should be noted that these numbers do only count those in the European competitions, rather than all players in national leagues.

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The cartogram above shows the share of international players in UEFA competitions. Each country outside UEFA is resized proportional to the number of players from there, and the ten largest countries are also labelled with their respective number of players. Countries that are members of UEFA as well as countries with no players are not changed and are shown in grey instead. The map shows how dominant African and South Americas countries are in these flows of international football migration into Europe.
In addition to the cartogram, a treemap visualises the overall geographical distribution of players in UEFA competitions by country. The treemap uses nested rectangles ordered by absolute size to display the share of players from each country. It is similar to early forms of cartograms, but does not include the geographical location in its display in order to give the hierarchical structure (from large to small) more prominence.
In the European-wide distribution of players it is interesting to observe that, despite large differences in the overall populations (as well as the active numbers of football players), the numbers of those who compete at European level seem much less apart from each other. The largest football nations do have the largest numbers, but with much smaller gaps to the smaller nations. England, for example, has only 2.4 times more players than Iceland in UEFA competitions, even if it is 164 times the population of Iceland. This is not least due the mobility of footballers and shows, how complex the geography of professional football has become.

A modified version of this map was published in the November 2016 edition of Geographical Magazine. The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post Sports Report: The globalised world of European football was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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The 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia has not been without controversy from the very beginning, starting with corruption allegations during the selection procedure to the most recent political incidents. And yet, the ball is rolling and the sporty side of the event is now getting more attention. From a data perspective, football world cups have become a gold mine that also helps to put a spotlight on the geographical landscapes of one of the most popular sports around the world. The world cup has become a game of dominance of European and South American dominance, while part of the appeal of the game is the unexpected success of ‘underdogs’ that beat the big players. The following maps are taken from a new series of football cartograms made for the Worldmapper website that visualises over eight decades of the event’s history. This is the shape of the football world:

World Cup Wins 1930 to 2014

World Cup Participations 1930 to 2018

Want more of this? See the full football world cup map series on Worldmapper.

The new Worldmapper website has been realised by Tina Gotthardt and Benjamin Hennig. All content is the property of Worldmapper and published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 conditions. Please contact us for more information on the terms of use or if you have any other questions about Worldmapper.

Oh, and while you are here: we still need your help! We had to move Worldmapper to an upgraded webserver to keep the site stable. Since this is all financed from our personal pockets, we kindly ask for a small donation that will help us to keep the new webserver up and running. Please support us:

Fund us on GoFundMe

The post World Cup Cartograms was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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There is a new map in town! Earlier this month during the 125th Anniversary Conference of the Geographical Association in Sheffield (UK) we relaunched the new Worldmapper.org online platform which has been several years in the making. It is not only a fully redesigned website, but also redefines what we want Worldmapper to become over a decade after it has first been released: An atlas for the 21st century that is mapping our place in the world using cartograms.
At the very heart of it Worldmapper is still a collection of world maps where countries are resized according to a broad range of global issues. But with the new website we will increasingly use more diverse cartogram techniques, such as gridded cartograms, as well as start including maps at different scales such as country-level mappings seen on this blog in many ways. Worldmapper will therefore be the most comprehensive repository for cartogram-style mappings that are unique visualisations showing the world as you’ve never seen it before. Check it out at: Worldmapper.org
To celebrate the occasion of the Geographical Association’s 125th Anniversary, we relaunched Worldmapper with a series of 125 new maps. Since then, the website has been growing constantly, and we keep adding new maps on a regular basis whenever we can. And we also have an open ear for your wishes and ideas!
Beyond the start page of the website, which showcases a selection of maps from our repository, the main place to go to discover our maps is the maps section which gives an overview of all material that can be further explored in the different new categories. We have also added a new Worldmapper blog (soon to be complemented by a newsletter) that in the long run will replace this website here with regular short cartogram features.
All of the content from the original Worldmapper website has been moved to a Worldmapper Archive where you now find all old material that has ever been produced in the project.
We will introduce the major cartographic and other changes in the Worldmapper blog in the near future. We have exciting collaborations and many new ideas planned. Meanwhile, here you can see the slides from the launch event in Sheffield earlier this month:

The new Worldmapper website has been realised by Tina Gotthardt and Benjamin Hennig. Please contact me if you have any questions or want to know more about Worldmapper.

The post Worldmapper: The Relaunch was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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Promoting equity in education and training is consistent with the European welfare state model, with part of the Europe 2020 Strategy aiming to significantly reduce numbers of early leavers from education and increase numbers of graduates with a university degree. The following maps give an insight into the social and spatial disparities in higher education across Europe’s countries and regions. They are all gridded population cartograms where each area is proportional to the number of people living there.
This is a map of students as a percentage of the total population aged 20–24. The reported share can often be higher than 100%, where there are more students who study and live in a city in term time than the numbers of 20- to 24-year-olds that the city officially houses. Also many students are counted who are aged 18, 19 or over 24:

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The areas with the highest proportions of students tend to be those comprising Europe’s large cities and city regions. London is an exception, as it no longer has as many undergraduate students studying there as other large European cities.
The highest rates were mostly found in regions of Romania, Poland, Greece and the Scandinavian countries, but the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Austria, Belgium, Spain and Portugal also scored highly.
The areas with the lowest rates were mostly found in Turkey and Italy, but also in Austria. Often areas with very high rates are surrounded by areas with very low rates from which young people move to study at university.

One of the key policy targets of the EU (as part of its Europe 2020 Strategy) is that by 2020 at least 40% of all 30- to 34-year-olds will have completed a qualification at tertiary or equivalent level. The following map shows the estimated numbers having achieved this level (mostly with a university degree or equivalent) in 2014 are shown here as a percentage of the total population aged 30–34:

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At EU level the estimated rate was 37.9%, not far off the 2020 target. Overall, the highest rates were mostly found in the UK (Inner London had by far the highest rate), the Scandinavian countries, France and Spain. The migration of graduates to the UK in recent years and especially to London made this possible.
Those regions with very high rates now include Cyprus and Lithuania, as well as the Slovak capital city region of Bratislava and the Polish capital city region of Warsaw (Mazovia). Rates are very low where little tertiary education is offered, and in other places, particularly Southern and Eastern European regions, where large numbers of young adults who receive a higher education then decide to move away (the ‘brain drain’).

The third map shows how the percentage of 30- to 34-year-olds with a university degree or equivalent changed between the years 2008 and 2014. The progress made by European regions towards the EU’s policy target becomes visible:

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The regions with the highest increases are mostly found in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic, Greece, Turkey and the UK. Within the UK these areas now include Greater Manchester (+14.2%), Cheshire (+14.6%), Gloucestershire (+13.1%) and Cumbria (+12.9%).
On the other hand, there was a decline in 41 regions, mostly found in Spain, France and Germany (and in particular, the regions in the East of Germany). However, four of the regions with a declining share of this age group having these qualifications were in the UK: North Yorkshire (–5.8%), Devon (–3.1%), Northumberland and Tyne and Wear
(–2.4%) and East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire (–1.2%).

These maps were used in a talk I recently gave at German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in collaboration with Global Young Academy in Halle (Saale) discussing inequalities in higher education:

 
The maps and explanations are taken from the Human Atlas of Europe that I published together with Dimitris Ballas and Danny Dorling:

• Ballas, D., Dorling, D. and Hennig, B.D. (2017) The human atlas of Europe. Bristol (Policy Press).
  Order book (Policy Press)

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig using education statistics by Eurostat. Please contact me for further details and the terms of use.

The post Higher Education Students and Graduates in Europe was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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The 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang have come to an end. Branded as the ‘Games of new horizons’, they were as much about politics as they were about actual sports. The following cartogram series focuses on the sports side of the games, showing the distribution of medals that were awarded during the games. The maps show each country resized according to the number of medals received by each country (with the Olympic Athlete from Russia shown as Russia):

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Olympic games are still an event that is largely influenced by wealth of participating nations. As the following cartogram of the number of participants shows, the most affluent countries are those that send most athletes to the games – with a slight bias towards classic ‘winter sports’-countries (when comparing this picture to participants as the last Summer Olympics):

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As the above map already indicates, the number of athletes participating at the games has an influence on the number of medals won, even if there are exceptions. Sometimes a graph can be better to show such correlations. The following scatter plot gives the diagram perspective on the numbers from the cartogram above by plotting the number of medals won at the 2018 Winter Olympics versus the number of athletes (for the stats geeks, the linear regression results in a r² value of 0.5406):

Those were the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Beijing 2022 is next (or Tokyo for the 2020 summer games).

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig using data by the PyeongChang 2018 Organising Committee. Please contact me for further details and the terms of use.

The post Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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7.6 billion people producing an estimated global GDP of 131 trillion dollars (measured in purchasing power parity), that is the world in 2018. In its latest forecast, the International Monetary Fund predicts predicts a continuing global economic growth of 3.9%, while according to the United Nations Population Division an extra 83 million people will populate this planet (1.9% growth). The following two cartograms show, how the distribution of wealth and people looks this year by resizing each country according to the total number of people (top)/GDP output (bottom):

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This unequal shape of the world has long become a challenge for the global community and therefore also took centre stage in many debates at the World Economic Forum: “The global context has changed dramatically: geostrategic fissures have re-emerged on multiple fronts with wide-ranging political, economic and social consequences. Realpolitik is no longer just a relic of the Cold War. Economic prosperity and social cohesion are not one and the same. The global commons cannot protect or heal itself.”

The content on this page has been created by Worldmapper using data by IMF, OECD, WorldBank and UNDP (2018). Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

The post The World in 2018 was written by Benjamin Hennig and published on Views of the World. If you enjoyed this, you might want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
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