Not a map but a different visual display of geographic information: this chart from The Economist (UK) shows average life expectancy at birth by country and the gap, in years, between male and female life expectancy. Every country has a longer life expectancy for females than males; those shown in the darkest blue have the largest gap between male and female life expectancy. www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/04/why-women-are-less-likely-than-men-to-die-from-covid-19
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The Turkish government wants you to call the country "Türkiye" instead of "Turkey." Although Türkiye (formally, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti or Republic of Turkey) is what the country has called itself since 1923, maps in the English-speaking world have always used Turkey. This article explains the reasons behind the change and includes a YouTube clip featuring the correct pronunciation of "Türkiye," which may or may not catch on in the U.S.: www.afar.com/magazine/why-turkey-is-now-turkiye
Indonesia is officially moving its capital from Jakarta: earlier this week the Indonesian legislature authorized building a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo. This map from Statista looks at other national capitals that have moved (and why): cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/25119.jpeg
Saudi Arabia is planning a new city. What makes this city different is that it is supposed to be a super-technologically advanced octagon-shaped industrial city floating in the Red Sea and powered entirely by clean energy. interestingengineering.com/a-floating-city-saudi-arabia-is-building-the-worlds-largest-sea-based-industrial-site
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime has prepared a Global Organized Crime Index. The index's mapping tool allows users to select for specific categories of crime (e.g., human trafficking, synthetic drugs, arms trafficking) as well as resilience factors (e.g., victim and witness support, international cooperation, government transparency). ocindex.net/
Factories in China produce an estimated 80 billion (yes, billion) pairs of disposable chopsticks each year. More than half of these disposable chopsticks are made of bamboo, according to China's forestry service. This article from Atlas Obscura provides a look at the industry: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/photographing-bamboo-chopstick-production-china
According to a recent report from First Street, nearly a quarter of U.S. critical infrastructure -- airports, police stations, utilities, hospitals, etc. -- are at risk of being inundated by floods, either from rivers or the seas. This article from Bloomberg provides a short summary of key findings and links to the entire 160+ page report: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-flood-risk-critical-infrastructure/
Carbon dioxide accounts for roughly half of the increase in global temperatures observed over the last 250 years. But methane -- a byproduct of agriculture, oil/gas production, and waste management practices -- accounts for nearly a quarter of the rise in global temperatures. This map from Bloomberg shows how the primary contributors of methane vary by country and region. (For more on this issue, including more maps and a look at the chemistry of CO2 vs. methane see the original article: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-methane-impact-on-climate/)
As of earlier this week, 98 countries (shown in red on this map) have pledged to support the resettlement of Afghan refugees "who have worked with us and those who are at risk." More than 120,000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan during August, representing the largest airlift effort since the 1948-49 airlifts of food and supplies to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin. www.statista.com/chart/25653/countries-pledging-to-accept-afghans
A new study, from a team of human geographers, analyzed satellite imagery of 913 major flooding events around the world from 2000 to 2018 and then compared population estimates in these same locations and discovered the population in flood-prone areas has grown by up to 86 million people, 10x faster than previously thought. Much of the population growth in floodplains has been part of the rural-to-urban migration in the Global South. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/04/tens-millions-people-have-been-moving-into-flood-zones-satellite-imagery-shows/
Most of the plastic that ends up in the world's oceans enters via rivers, primarily Asian rivers that run through densely populated urban areas. In fact, a recent study finds that Asian rivers contribute more than 80% of the plastic that finds its way to the sea, with the Pasig River being the single largest source of plastic pollution. The Pasig is the river that bisects Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. According to this geo-graphic, three of the world's five most plastic-polluted rivers are in the Philippines. www.statista.com/chart/25005/riverine-plastic-emissions-by-continent
Long ago, Native American communities were moved to or allowed to exist in marginal lands, lands that Euro-American settlers, miners, or the U.S. government didn't particularly want. Those marginal lands are now proving to be particularly vulnerable to climate change. This article looks at the intersection of physical geography and human geography via the current impacts of climate-related changes on Native communities -- from rising waters and melting permafrost in Alaska to extended drought in the Southwest and the Ozarks to coastal erosion in the Pacific Northwest -- and the tricky question of who is supposed to "fix" the problem. www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/climate/climate-Native-Americans.html
Since the beginning of the civil war in neighboring Syria 10 years ago, Lebanon has hosted the largest number of externally displaced people on a per-capita basis. At one point, as many as one in four people in Lebanon were Syrian refugees. In 2020, the island of Aruba (technically part of the Netherlands) supplanted Lebanon as the host of the greatest per-capita number of externally displaced people, most of whom have fled nearby Venezuela. This geo-graphic, based on UN data, shows the eight countries hosting the most externally displaced people on a per-capita basis: www.statista.com/chart/3576/the-countries-with-the-most-refugees-per-capita
Interested in resuming international travel? This article from The New York Times travel section details what the current rules are for Americans traveling to other countries. At least for now, the article appears to be updated regularly as new information becomes available. www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-travel-restrictions.html
One of the sticking points in the infrastructure bill before Congress is spending nearly $100 billion to encourage companies to build out affordable broadband internet networks. This map shows the severity of the broadband problem in rural America: in the counties shown in blue, fewer than 15% of households are using the internet at speeds of at least 25 Mbps (the minimum speed to be considered broadband). Mousing over the map in the article reveals that even in many counties shown in gray, substantially fewer than 40% of households have broadband. www.theverge.com/22418074/broadband-gap-america-map-county-microsoft-data
Earlier this week, the MV X-Press Pearl, bound for Colombo, Sri Lanka, caught fire and sank, releasing 78 tons of plastic pellets into the Indian Ocean, tens of millions of which are now covering Sri Lanka's beaches. The plastic pellets aboard the MV X-Press Pearl were to be used in the production of plastic bags. This geo-graphic looks at single-use plastic waste by country: www.statista.com/chart/24874/single-use-plastic-waste-generated-per-person-in-selected-countries
In advance of Earth Day, this geo-graphic looks at the 20 global cities with the worst air pollution, as measured by particulate matter. Although the Chinese city of Hotan, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, tops the list, 18 of the 20 cities with the worst air pollution are in South Asia. www.statista.com/chart/17239/average-level-of-particulate-matter-pollution
If you have noticed bananas crept up in price this year, it's for the same reason the majority of families and unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border are from Honduras and Guatemala: Eta and Iota, the back-to-back Category 4 hurricanes that devastated swaths of Central America last November. The destruction stunned even disaster relief veterans. This recent article from The New York Times looks at this unfortunate collision of physical geography and human geography. www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/world/americas/migration-honduras-central-america.html
Because warmer air can hold more moisture, humidity is expected to rise along with global temperatures. A recent study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that the combination could push human life in the tropics to the breaking point. "Humans’ ability to regulate their body heat is dependent upon the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air. We have a core body temperature that stays relatively stable at 37C (98.6F), while our skin is cooler to allow heat to flow away from the inner body. But should the wet-bulb temperature – a measure of air temperature and humidity – pass 35C, high skin temperature means the body is unable to cool itself, with potentially deadly consequences. ... The research team looked at various historical data and simulations to determine how wet-bulb temperature extremes will change as the planet continues to heat up, discovering that these extremes in the tropics increase at around the same rate as the tropical mean temperature. ... This has potentially dire implications for a huge swathe of humanity. Around 40% of the world’s population currently lives in tropical countries, with this proportion set to expand to half of the global population by 2050 due to the large proportion of young people in region. The Princeton research was centered on latitudes found between 20 degrees north, a line that cuts through Mexico, Libya and India, to 20 degrees south, which goes through Brazil, Madagascar and the northern reaches of Australia. ... '“Theoretically no human can tolerate a wet bulb temperature of above 35C, no matter how much water they have to drink,' [Boise State climate risk expert Mojtaba Sadegh] added."
www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heating-tropical-regions-human-livability In the U.S., lack of access to running water has tended to be associated with rural areas. But, as this geo-graphic based on a report prepared by the National Academy of Sciences shows, water insecurity in the U.S. is primarily an urban problem, with 73% of households that lack hot and cold running water located in cities, the majority of these being renters and people of color. cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23731.jpeg
This geo-graphic is supposed to be a visualization of countries' share of the earth's surface, but the more salient piece, at least for me, is the share of the earth's surface that is either international water (43%) or, perhaps more surprisingly, territorial water (27%).
www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-by-share-of-earths-surface/ Earlier this month, the Ocean Renewable Energy Action Coalition released a roadmap to produce 1,400 GW of electricity -- or about 10% of the world's electricity -- via offshore wind farms by 2050. This map shows areas considered particularly well suited to offshore wind farms: 3ohkdk3zdzcq1dul50oqjvvf-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2.-This-map-shows-the-vast-potential-Hywind-1024x579.jpg
This short looping video from Visual Capitalist compares the continents by land area, population, and GDP: www.visualcapitalist.com/animated-map-the-comparative-might-of-continents/
The Institute for Economics & Peace (headquartered in Australia) has released its first Ecological Threat Register, "which measures ecological threats that countries are projected to face between now and 2050. The report uniquely combines measures of resilience with the most comprehensive ecological data available, to shed light on the countries least likely to cope with extreme ecological shocks." Among the report's findings: by 2040, more than half of the world's population will be living in countries experiencing "high" or "extreme" water stress; by 2050, the number of people suffering from food insecurity could more than double, to 3.5 billion; mass population displacement is likely with more than one billion people living in countries where the country’s resilience is unlikely to withstand the impact of ecological events by 2050. To download the report and explore the data, visit visionofhumanity.org/app/uploads/2020/09/ETR_2020_web-1.pdf
By the end of 2018, renewable energy accounted for more than one-quarter of electricity generation globally, of which solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines were contributing the majority of new capacity. These maps, which originally appeared in Nature, show the global distribution of solar (top) and wind (bottom) installations as of earlier this year: powercompare.co.uk/global-solar-wind-installations/
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