How do you count everyone in a country where some communities are hard to reach because of geography, insecurity, or limited infrastructure? This is the challenge Cameroon is taking on as it prepares for its first national census in nearly two decades, and it’s doing so with an innovative hybrid approach. Earlier this week in […]
Hybrid Census in Cameroon: Making Sure Everyone Counts Read More »
As climate change intensifies, extreme heat is becoming a daily reality for millions of people living in cities. In response, governments are rolling out heat adaptation measures such as cooling centres, greener urban spaces and public heat warnings. But a crucial question remains: do these strategies actually work, and do they work equally for everyone?
When Heatwaves Strike, Do City Adaptation Measures Really Help? Read More »
What counts as a city? It sounds like a simple question, until you realise that countries define “urban” in exceptionally different ways. In Denmark, a settlement with 200 people qualifies as urban. In Japan, you need 50,000 residents plus certain economic activities. With standards this far apart, comparing cities across borders is challenging. To smooth
DEGURBA: Why Your Urban Definition Depends on Your Data Read More »
WorldPop recently completed its first workshop on automated census mapping in Malawi, a milestone for the joint FCDO-funded project with the Malawi National Statistics Office (NSO) ahead of their 2028 national census. Led by Dr Sarchil Qader and Dr Aubrey Steingrabber over two intensive weeks, 22 NSO colleagues and 4 students from the University of
Skills for Smarter Planning: How DEGURBA Capacity Building Is Empowering Countries Read More »
In today’s interconnected world, a local outbreak can become a global crisis with remarkable speed. Planes link distant cities in hours, social media connects millions in seconds, and our daily routines weave together countless invisible threads of contact. A recent scoping review led by WorldPop PhD researcher Zhifeng Cheng and published in Infectious Diseases of
How Our Social Connections Shape the Spread of Disease: What New Research Reveals Read More »
WorldPop recently completed its first workshop on automated census mapping in Malawi, a milestone for the joint FCDO-funded project with the Malawi National Statistics Office (NSO) ahead of their 2028 national census. Led by Dr Sarchil Qader and Dr Aubrey Steingrabber over two intensive weeks, 22 NSO colleagues and 4 students from the University of
First Automated Census-Mapping Workshop in Malawi a Success Read More »
In late October, WorldPop joined statistical leaders from across the Caribbean at the 50th meeting of the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Standing Committee on Caribbean Statistics in Willemstad, Curaçao. Deputy Director Ian Coady, Senior Enterprise Fellow Dr Natalia Garavito-Tejedor and Senior Programme Coordinator, Kathryn Baxter represented WorldPop at a moment when high-quality, accessible data is becoming
The 2025 Human Planet Forum gathered global experts in population modelling, urban analytics, and Earth observation for three days of scientific progress and growing collaboration. A central theme throughout the meeting was the acceleration of high-resolution, openly accessible global datasets and included a presentation by Professor Andy Tatem of our new, open Global 2 (2015-2030)
Progress in Population and Urban Data: Highlights from the Human Planet Forum 2025 Read More »
This week, WorldPop Director Professor Andy Tatem presented during the Monitoring, projecting and hindcasting of human settlements, infrastructure and population session at the Human Planet Forum 2025, introducing the next generation of WorldPop’s global population datasets: Global 2 (2015–2030). These new datasets represent a major step forward in how the world measures, understands, and anticipates
WorldPop Global 2: A New Era of High-Resolution Population Data Read More »
Understanding how diseases spread in a connected world is one of the greatest challenges in modern public health. Traditional models (like the well-known Susceptible, Infectious, and Recovered (SIR) framework) often assume that everyone mixes uniformly, meaning each person has an equal chance of interacting with everyone else. But reality is far more complex. Human populations
The WorldPop research programme, based in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton, is a multi-sectoral team of researchers, technicians and project specialists that produces data on population distributions and characteristics at high spatial resolution.
Initiated in October 2013 to combine The AfriPop Project, AsiaPop and AmeriPop projects, we have a diverse portfolio of projects, including large multi-million-pound collaborative projects with partner organisations, commercial data providers and international development organisations.
