Where Did Eight Billion People Go? A 33-Year Investigation

In 1990, the world held 5.3 billion people. By 2022, that number had crossed 8 billion. But the raw count obscures the real story: not how many people there are, but where they went. GlobPOP traces that movement at 1km resolution across 33 consecutive years, revealing patterns invisible to national statistics. Cities that barely existed in 1990 — Shenzhen, Dhaka's satellite towns, the sprawl radiating from Lagos — now appear as dense population cores in the latest grids. Meanwhile, entire rural provinces in Eastern Europe and East Asia have faded to near-emptiness, their populations absorbed by distant urban centers.

The dataset's construction is a feat of statistical engineering. National censuses, conducted at different years and different granularities by 200+ countries, are harmonized and disaggregated using satellite-derived settlement layers and nighttime light imagery. The result is a globally consistent population surface that can be queried at any 1km cell for any year from 1990 to 2022. This consistency is what makes GlobPOP uniquely valuable: unlike snapshot products that capture a single year, it enables trend analysis. Researchers can ask not just "how many people live here" but "how has this place changed" — and get a 33-year answer.

With 273,000 downloads, GlobPOP has become foundational infrastructure for fields ranging from epidemiology to disaster response to climate adaptation. The World Bank uses it to estimate populations in areas between censuses. Humanitarian organizations use it to pre-position aid supplies before cyclone landfalls. Climate modelers use it to project future exposure to heat waves, flooding, and sea level rise. The dataset does not merely describe where people live — it has become the denominator in calculations that affect how resources, risks, and responses are allocated across the planet.