By the 12 months 2050 the world’s city inhabitants is anticipated to extend by 2.5 billion, with almost 90% of that development occurring in cities throughout Asia and Africa. To successfully plan for this inhabitants development, reply to crises, and perceive urbanization’s influence, governments, humanitarian organizations, and researchers want information about buildings and infrastructure, together with how they’re altering over time. Nonetheless, many areas throughout the World South lack entry to this information, hindering improvement efforts.
In 2021, we launched the Open Buildings dataset, considerably growing the variety of publicly mapped buildings in Africa. We later expanded the trouble to incorporate buildings in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South and Southeast Asia. Since then, the Open Buildings dataset has been extensively utilized by UN businesses, NGOs and researchers for planning electrification, disaster response, vaccination campaigns, and extra.
Open Buildings dataset customers have requested information displaying constructing adjustments over time, which might enhance city planning and assist us higher perceive adjustments in human influence on the surroundings. One other widespread request is for approximate constructing heights, which may also help estimate inhabitants density for catastrophe response or useful resource allocation efforts. Each of those are difficult as a result of limitations of obtainable high-resolution satellite tv for pc imagery captured solely at sure locations and occasions. For some rural areas and the World South the final imagery was captured years in the past, making it difficult to successfully observe adjustments or perceive the present state of affairs.
To that finish, we introduce the Open Buildings 2.5D Temporal Dataset, which is predicated on new experimental outcomes that estimate adjustments over time and supply peak information for buildings throughout the World South. The dataset yearly generates a map of estimated constructing presence, counts and heights from 2016 to 2023, and covers a 58M km2 area throughout Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia utilizing 10m decision imagery from Sentinel-2. It may be accessed on the Open Buildings web site or by way of Earth Engine.
