Novel data for a better urban future – ensuring data continuity with the Global Human Settlement Layer

This event will host the launch of the new Global Human Settlement Layer data release 2.0 (GHSL 2.0). The sustainability, resilience, and capacity to adapt human settlements to urban futures is essential for our society. Decision makers from the city to the international level use it to take decisions and shape urban futures. Geospatial information on human settlements helps making progress towards the New Urban Agenda, the SDGs, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Paris Agreement. Detailed and updated information on population, building stocks and settlement classification by Degree of Urbanisation produced by the Global Human Settlement Layer project at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre supports various applications across disaster risk management, sustainable development, urbanisation, environment, and sustainability. GHSL provides analysis ready geospatial data to derive human settlement statistics. When GHSL data were released at Habitat III, it pioneered in the offer of free and open global information on human settlements making information integration, harmonisation and redistribution spatially and temporally consistent. 

Human settlements will experience the effects of a changing climate, so data driven urban management (planning and governance) can help mitigating forecasted impacts and develop resilient urban futures. The GHSL 2.0 supports this with an improved spatial resolution, thanks to the use of the European Copernicus Sentinel satellites. The new data improve the thematic mapping of built-up surfaces separating residential from non-residential surfaces extending the temporal coverage, from 1975 to 2020 and projections to 2025 and 2030. To ensure that information is constantly updated and accurate, the Copernicus Programme will ensure an operational production of GHSL human settlement data for the future.