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As countries increasingly look like they will fail to meet the targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the need for timely and robust data on which to build national and international policy has never been more evident.

Despite this need for more data, people are becoming increasingly hard to count. Global conflict makes enumeration difficult, funding for traditional census activities is shrinking and even where we can count people, response rates are falling leaving big gaps in the demographic data.

However, geospatial data can help us to address these gaps. Building footprints, nightlight data and landcover are some of the data types that are a useful indicator of where people are likely to be, and so when combined with statistical data can be modelled into a high-resolution, gridded population estimate.

This webinar will explore how the WorldPop Research Group at the University of Southampton is combining traditional survey data with new geospatial data sources to develop innovative data science methods that can help us to better understand the spatial distribution of people across the globe, even in countries where it has traditionally been hard to count people.

It will also explore the impact that these data can have in underpinning effective, evidence-based policy, with applications in health, education and disaster response.

About the speaker

Ian Coady is the Deputy Director of the WorldPop Research Group at the University of Southampton. He has previously designed geospatial development programmes at the UK FCDO and supported the integration of geospatial data and statistics at the Office for National Statistics.

For the last eight years Ian has also been a humanitarian volunteer for the charity MapAction, helping to map disaster responses to ensure that the right aid reaches the right people in the right places.