35 Years of Harnessing the Power of Geospatial Data for Decision Making – State of the Planet

The Climate School’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is celebrating its 35th year since its founding as an independent nonprofit in 1989, and its 25th year housed at Columbia University. These anniversaries come with another milestone: a new name. As of today, CIESIN will now stand for the Center for Integrated Earth System Information.

CIESIN’s mission is to make complex environmental, social and economic data easy to access and use so that people can make better decisions about pressing issues like climate change, disaster response and sustainable development.

“The name change better captures our core strength, which is an integrated perspective on the whole Earth system, including not just the environmental but also the social and economic systems,” said CIESIN’s recently appointed director, Alex de Sherbinin.

Since its inception, CIESIN has transformed the way the world thinks about using geospatial and other data-science approaches to pressing interdisciplinary issues such as climate change, pandemics, conflict, disaster risk mitigation and sustainable development.

Established as a nonprofit consortium based in Michigan, CIESIN “grew up” when the internet was just starting to develop, and when new geographic information system (GIS) software and data were emerging as tools for visualizing and analyzing environmental problems.

In 1998, CIESIN became a center within Columbia’s Earth Institute and relocated to the university’s Lamont campus, where it remains today as a part of the Columbia Climate School.

“At the time, there was recognition that science was producing valuable data, but only relatively few people had the expertise and capabilities to find, access, analyze and use it,” said Robert Chen, CIESIN’s long-time director, who retired last year. “Our mission was to unlock the potential of geospatial data for decision making.”

The First Gridded Population of the World

One of CIESIN’s first breakthroughs came in 1994, when it published the Gridded Population of the World (GPW), a dataset that mapped population distribution across the globe onto a uniform, gridded scale in a consistent manner.

GPW was one of the earliest and most widely used datasets in GIS. It led to a generation of more precise studies of population density, distribution, and dynamics for every part of the world.

“Before GPW, population data was typically organized by administrative units such as countries, states and districts. This made it difficult for us to analyze population patterns in a spatially continuous manner,” de Sherbinin said.

By representing all this data on a grid instead, GPW enabled scientists to compare and analyze population distribution across different regions without being constrained by political boundaries. This is crucial for studying phenomena that cross borders, such as climate change, disease spread or biodiversity patterns.

“Let’s say you want to assess the number of vulnerable people living in the flood-prone areas of the Mississippi Valley. Those areas don’t match up perfectly to country or municipal boundaries,” de Sherbinin said. “If you try to do the analysis using administrative units, it becomes a very clumsy task. But with a gridded dataset like GPW, it’s a much simpler geospatial operation and it takes a lot less time and computational effort. The data can also easily be integrated with remote sensing, climate and other Earth data that come in gridded formats.”

Because of this, GPW contributed to the mainstream adoption of GIS in environmental science, urban planning, public health and other fields.

The dataset is still being used today, notably to support the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by providing detailed population data to track population dynamics, urbanization and resource allocation, which are critical for achieving sustainable development.

Preserving and providing access to Earth science data

Shortly after moving to Columbia, CIESIN won a contract to operate its longest standing project: the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC).

SEDAC houses a massive archive of social, economic and environmental data. These include demographics and population projections, land use, land cover, air quality, disaster risk and more.

“It serves as a bridge between the science and policy communities, providing valuable datasets to help researchers and decision makers analyze human-environment interactions and the impacts of global change,” de Sherbinin said.

In the ensuing decades, CIESIN has leveraged these innovations in spatial, demographic and socioeconomic data and mapping to lead a number of projects that have had important policy implications.

“For example, the Environmental Performance Index, in collaboration with Yale University, has demonstrably led to changes in environmental policy and resource management by a range of countries,” said Chen. The EPI ranks countries on sustainability based on 58 performance indicators.

Another project, on mapping natural disaster hotspots, helped provide justification for the World Bank’s establishment of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery in 2006.

CIESIN’s other funders include various UN organizations, as well as the US Agency for International Development, US Department of Energy and a number of other state and federal agencies (see here for a list of major projects).

“All the data we produce through external funding we also disseminate through SEDAC, so they become a public good for further scientific analysis,” de Sherbinin said.

Addressing geospatial data gaps in the developing world

Perhaps no other project exemplifies the ability for CIESIN to put into practice its core strengths than the GRID3 project.

GRID3, which stands for Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development, took on a longstanding and thorny problem that humanitarian and development focused institutions faced in Africa: the lack of accurate, up-to-date, localized population and infrastructure data.

“You can’t do effective planning, decision-making and emergency response without this information,” said de Sherbinin. “In low income countries, there’s a significant portion of the population that lives in unnamed settlements of unknown population size. These may show up on a satellite image, but they’re not named on the map, and therefore are essentially invisible for planning purposes, whether it’s for education, healthcare clinics or vaccination campaigns.”

So GRID3, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK Department for International Development, the World Health Organization and others, filled in these critical geographic data gaps by using satellite imagery, census information, and local surveys.

The datasets GRID3 helped create have been used to support polio eradication in Nigeria, improve the delivery of health services in the Democratic Republic of Congo, optimize the distribution of polling stations in Zambia and more.

Because of its success, GRID3 is now an independent, nonprofit organization, run by CIESIN’s former deputy director, Marc Levy. CIESIN still provides GRID3 with technical support.

Bringing Geographic Thinking to the Climate School

CIESIN has a unique role to play as part of the Climate School and at Columbia writ large, said de Sherbinin. “It isn’t just the GIS and spatial analysis toolkit we’re known for, but also the integrative abilities that we have. Geographers tend to be the glue-people on large interdisciplinary projects that involve complex human-environment dynamics…exactly the kind of problems the Climate School wants to address.”

The center’s more recent projects on climate migration, climate justice, siting of solar desalination plants, and managed retreat illustrate this closer alignment to the Climate School’s mission.

Poor and vulnerable populations are differentially impacted and need particular forms of assistance with either relocating or adapting in place. So all these concerns fundamentally come down to very place-specific needs, adjusting to the real implications that climate is having on society.

CIESIN scientists currently teach in both the Climate School’s MA in Climate & Society program as well as the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development, where they’re part of an innovative course working with local environmental justice organizations on solving local problems through geospatial approaches. CIESIN will also contribute to the new MS in Climate‘s Climate Systems and Analytics Advanced Certificate.

“The goal is to develop a broader suite of courses addressing topics such as open and participatory science, co-production of knowledge, and data for decision making,” said de Sherbinin.