Monitoring Near-Time Changes in Urban Space Usage after Climate Shocks#
Understanding how populations use urban space is crucial for assessing economic activity, societal resilience, and infrastructure accessibility. However, measuring urban space usage with the frequency and detail needed for these assessments can be difficult when relying solely on traditional survey methods. To address this challenge, the team proposes using mobility data—telemetry data from mobile devices—to create high-frequency indices of urban space usage. This includes areas like retail centers, construction sites, manufacturing zones, financial centers, and residential areas.
Recent uses of mobility data, such as COVID-19 Community Mobility reports and projects within the Development Data Partnership, have shown its potential for informing pandemic responses, analyzing public transit trends, and identifying informal trade routes. These examples highlight the value of mobility data in generating timely and detailed statistics (e.g., [1] [2] [3]).
This project aims to explore how human mobility and urban space usage change in response to climate shocks. The methodology and findings will enhance our understanding of urban space utilization during extreme climate events, enable regional comparisons, identify correlations between urban space usage and climate shocks, and support predictive analyses. Ultimately, this research will aid in making evidence-based policy and planning decisions to improve urban climate resilience.
To ensure that the research informs World Bank operations, the DECSC team is collaborating with the European and Central Asia Sustainable Development (SCADR) team. The ECA region is increasingly vulnerable to climate change, with rising temperatures and more erratic weather patterns leading to more frequent extreme events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and forest fires. The poorest countries and most vulnerable households are expected to suffer the most from these impacts, through lost livelihoods and environmental degradation (e.g., [4]). In response, the ECA SD team is spearheading a series of ASA and lending activities aimed at enhancing the climate resilience of ECA countries, particularly in urban areas. The research conducted under this grant will directly support these efforts.
Table of Contents#
Monitoring Near-Time Changes in Urban Space Usage after Climate Shocks
Data Products
Bibliography#
- 1
Rendra Achyunda, Anugrah Putra, and Silvia Fitri Mei Arini. Measuring the economics of a pandemic: how people mobility depict economics? an evidence of people's mobility data towards economic activities. randra putra, silvia arini. 2020. URL: https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Conferences/2020/8th-stats-forum/paper-rendra-putra-and-silvia-arini.ashx.
- 2
Nicos Makris, Gholamreza Moghimi, Eric Godat, and Tue M. Vu. Mechanical analogue for cities. Royal Society Open Science, 2022. doi:10.1098/rsos.220943.
- 3
Jay Saha, Bikash Barman, and Pradip Chouhan. Lockdown for COVID-19 and its impact on community mobility in India: An analysis of the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, 2020. Children and Youth Services Review, 116:105160 – 105160, 2020. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105160.
- 4
Climate Change in Europe and Central Asia. URL: https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/brief/climate-change-in-europe-and-central-asia (visited on 2023-01-05).