title: Night-time lights: A global, long term look at links to socio-economic trends.
abstract: We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data-the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset-surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries globally. Doing so allows a retrospective look at the global, long-term relationships between night-time lights and a series of socio-economic indicators. We find the strongest correlations with electricity consumption, CO2 emissions, and GDP, followed by population, CH4 emissions, N2O emissions, poverty (inverse) and F-gas emissions. Relating area lit to electricity consumption shows that while a basic linear model provides a good statistical fit, regional and temporal trends are found to have a significant impact.
authors.affiliation: Office of Economic Policy and Analysis, Environmental Defense Fund, New York, New York, United States of America.
authors.forename: Jeremy
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6789-9685
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Proville
authors.affiliation: Climate and Energy Program, Environmental Defense Fund, Austin, Texas, United States of America.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zavala-Araiza
authors.affiliation: John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, and Harvard University Center for the Environment, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
authors.forename: Gernot
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Wagner
mesh_terms: D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D017752:Greenhouse Effect; D008029:Lighting; D011203:Poverty; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors