Poverty Atlas helps reveal why people are poor
This is Earth & Sky. Scientists have developed a series of maps showing where you’ll find Earth’s poorest people.
Bob Chen, manager of NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Application Center, told us the reason for this “Atlas of Poverty” – part of the Global Poverty Mapping Project.
Bob Chen: That’s important for understanding not only why poverty exists and persists, but how can you best help poor people.
The Atlas of Poverty combines socio-economic and population data with satellites images indicating land cover, precipitation, urbanization, and so on. Researchers can use the maps to try to determine the key reasons for poverty.
Earth & Sky asked Dr. Chen, where do the poor live?
Bob Chen: There are some very poor countries that have most of their population in poverty. But even in those countries, there’s a lot of variation between the better-off and the worse-off. It’s not easy to generalize because there are high pockets of poverty in urban areas, there are high pockets of poverty on coastlines in some countries. But you see reverse patterns for various reasons.
Our thanks today to NASA: explore, discover, understand.
Additional Teacher Resources
The Center for International Earth Science Information Network: Global Distribution of Poverty
The Global Poverty Mapping Project seeks to enhance current understanding of the global distribution of poverty and the geographic and biophysical conditions of where the poor live. Additionally, the project aims to assist policy makers, development agencies, and the poor themselves in designing interventions to reduce poverty.
United Nations Environment Program: Poverty Mapping
This collection of maps and graphics provides some samples of how messages relating to poverty and various other issues can be communicated effectively. The graphics in this collection were selected from a variety of sources.
