Data Is The New Oil - 01.04.2021 Update
Effective carbon pricing, Flood mapping, Covid-19 in Europe, Population density and Building's energy demand.
🏭 Effective carbon pricing. The OECD released its effective carbon rates dataset, which measures the pricing of CO2 emissions from energy use in 44 countries, covering 80% of world emissions. The analysis incorporates fuel excise taxes, carbon taxes and tradable emission permit prices, and can be split by country and sector. The "carbon pricing score" measures how close each country is to the goal of pricing all energy-related carbon emissions. A report will be published at the end of April.
🌊 Real-time flood mapping. NASA maintains a real-time database of large-scale floods, which, from today, is hosted on the Lance platform. The dataset is based on the MODIS satellite programme, which can revisit every location on earth twice a day. Detecting floods from space is relatively straightforward, however because MODIS uses optical sensors, floods can often be hidden by terrain shadows and clouds. NASA uses a cloud shadow mask to get around this issue. Radar data, such as from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 programme, can also be used, as it goes through clouds, but revisit time is less than for MODIS. The files are available in GeoTIFF format and have accuracy of 250 metres.
🦠 Covid-19 in Europe. Researchers published a comprehensive database of Covid-19 cases in Europe at the subnational level. It also includes socio-economic variables such as unemployment rate, population density and the percentage of smokers, which are helpful explainers of the pandemic’s spread. A paper explains the initiative.
👪 Population density. Facebook and Columbia University released detailed population density maps for India and Pakistan, using hand-labelled data from various locations, census figures and an algorithm used to identify buildings in satellite images. They are the latest additions to a library already covering nearly 200 countries. A separate paper and dataset take a similar approach for Germany.
🏢 Buildings’ energy demand. France published a large dataset describing the energy efficiency of nearly 500k dwellings. It includes information such as surface area, the type of heating and the number of windows, as well as energy use.
Other Data Updates
The World Bank published its 2021 estimates for economic growth by country.
The city of London published a time series of Covid-19 restrictions over time.
The world income inequality database was updated to include the year 2019 and 200 countries.
Ember Climate released its annual dataset of electricity production by country and source.
Analyst Cedric Rossi published a geocoded dataset of agricultural and industrial sites in France.
Upcoming Data Releases
A global epidemics dataset 1500-2020 (link)
US climate normals (link)
PV Installed capacity and actual generation in Japan (link)
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