The European Commission Joint Research Centre and its Global Human Settlement team have been conducting extensive research related to the ubranisation and socio-economic and physical processes associated with it.
The newly published report based on analysis of the satellite data “Global spatial and temporal analysis of human settlements from Optical Earth Observation: Concepts, procedures, and preliminary results”, is one of the result of this work.
Human settlements are the part of the landscape covered with man-made structures that include buildings, roads and transport networks.
The report addresses the physical part of human settlements, the information that is used to help answering numer of questions related with urbanisation and its challenges. For example, how much of the today’s urban and rural land areas will be used to host the settlements of tomorrow? What is the rate of growth associated to urbanization and its trends? How does urbanisation increase the risk due to environmental hazards?
Knowledge about this issues help the crisis management in case disasters.
(Source European Commission Joint Research Centre) and Copernicus