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ENVIRON 390K: Human Domination of the Earth/Systems Thinking: Finding Data

Research guide for Dr. James Reynolds' course, 2016

Climate Change and African Political Stability

The Climate Change and African Political Stability program analyzes how climate change, conflict, governance, and aid intersect to impact African and international security. Researchers have produced a number of new datasets and tools to examine these issues.

  1. Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset
    This dataset, compiled by CCAPS, provides data on literacy rates, primary and secondary school attendance rates, access to improved water and sanitation, household access to electricity, and household ownership of radio and television at the subnational level, specifically the first administrative district level.
     
  2. Climate Vulnerability Model
    The CCAPS climate security vulnerability model combines data on physical, socio-economic, demographic, and political insecurities to develop a holistic model of vulnerability, using Geographic Information Systems to locate the confluence of these various sources of vulnerability.
     
  3. Malawi Geocoded and Climate Aid Dataset
    The Climate Change and African Political Stability program analyzes how climate change, conflict, governance, and aid intersect to impact African and international security. The dataset includes all types of aid for the 30 donors in Malawi's Aid Management Platform, geocoded and climate-coded to provide a more complete picture of how adaptation fits into development efforts within the country.

Data Collections at Duke

  1. Air Markets Program Data (EPA)
    This site offers various emissions and effects datasets which can be visually integrated and analyzed in map format according to your area of interest. Topics include: area boundaries, air, climate/meteorology, demographics, deposition, emissions, land, sensitive resources, and etc.
     
  2. Geo Data Portal
    The GEO Data Portal is the authoritative source for data sets used by UNEP and its partners in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report.  Its online database holds more than 400 different variables, as national, subregional, regional and global statistics or as geospatial data sets (maps), covering themes like Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health and GDP. Data can be displayed on-the-fly as maps, graphs, raw values, and or downloaded in different formats.
     
  3. Weather Observation Station Locator
    Offers searching for weather stations by station name, county, state, and ZIP code. Results include data inventories, links to online data (Daily Surface Data, and and station history.
     
  4. Environmental Sustainability Index
    "The Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) is a measure of overall progress towards environmental sustainability for 146 countries. The ESI scores are based upon a set of 21 core "indicators and " each of which combines two to six variables for a total of 76 underlying variables.
     
  5. Population, Landscape, And Climate Expectations (Place)
    "The PLACE data set provides, in tabular format (Excel or CSV), estimates of national-level aggregations for the following thematic areas: 1) biome, 2) climate, 3) coastal proximity, 4) elevation, and 5) population density. It permits easy comparisons across countries.