60 years of global development and environmental change 1939–1999

The 20th century was a period of unprecedented global change, both for human development and for the environment. To understand long-run development, we must first be able to measure these changes.

Evidence from 1.67 million historical aerial photographs

Reliable sub-national data on economic development only go back to 1990 for many developing countries, and measures of environmental change are only widely available since the era of modern satellite imagery. Researchers have thus to date been unable to analyze long-run sub-national economic growth or large-scale environmental change further back in time.

This project is digitizing, processing and making accessible a remarkable archive of 1.67 million aerial photographs from across the developing world, dating back to the late 1930s, previously only available to researchers in person. In doing so, we will construct the first sub-national measures of wealth for more than 60 countries across the developing world between 1939 and 1990, and expand the horizon over which data are available to study global long-run environmental change by between 30 and 60 years, or more than 50%.

All project outputs, including mosaicked, georeferenced imagery and data products, will be made available freely online under Creative commons licensing. Exploiting these rich and novel data, we will provide evidence on important unresolved questions about the determinants of long-run growth and the relationships between development and the environment. More broadly, we expect the data to be applicable in fields as diverse as geology, archaeology, ecology, and climatology.