07-13-2006 - Human World

sagar: Author=’Eleanor Imster’ program=’4939′ video=”This is “Earth & Sky”:/http://208.96.63.114/. 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”:http://sedac.ciesin.org/index.html, 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”:http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/povmap/ 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”:http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1: explore, discover, understand.

Written by EarthSky