The Subnational Urbanization Projections for China, India, and the United States

Leiwen Jiang , Population Council and Shanghai University
Hamidreza Zoraghein, University of Denver

The NCAR Urbanization Projection Model was used to generate global national urbanization projections for all countries under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) – the new IPCC socioeconomic scenarios. However, the climate change research communities require subnational urbanization projections to account for the large variations in the urban growth of big countries in the process of developing extended SSP scenarios. This study taking advantage of the more recent development of the Projection Model and the newly available data to project urbanization trends of subnational regions (provinces of China, states of India and the U.S., as examples). We carried out validation analysis through comparing projected urbanization trends in the past decades against observed urbanization records at both national and subnational levels. It shows that the improved model produces reasonable and unbiased projection outcomes, covering a wide range of plausible urbanization paths for the long- and medium-term for countries and subnational regions.

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 Presented in Session 3. Population, Development, & the Environment; Data & Methods; Applied Demography