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The fact that poverty and public health are related is widely understood, but the relationship is often difficult to quantify. Recognizing this, researchers, activists, and policy makers are beginning to combine "poverty maps" that locate the poor with maps that identify environmental conditions, creating a tool that helps guide policy decisions and remediation actions.
The use of such spatial analysis tools to understand the connections between health and where people live can be tracked to nineteenth-century Europe. John Snow's 1854 cholera map of London was credited with stopping an epidemic by identifying and inactivating its source: a pump that drew water from a well contaminated with sewage. And Charles Booth advanced the technique with his 1 889 street map of London in which every street was colored to indicate the social and economic class of its inhabitants.
Enhanced computer power and the advent of geographic information system (GIS) mapping software now enables a kind of multidimensional mapmaking that the early poverty mappers would have envied. Today's digital maps present layers of data that are linked to geographic location-for example, a region's highway infrastructure, forest cover, building locations, the presence of airborne toxicants, and infant mortality-and allow these data to be displayed, manipulated, and analyzed in any manner of ways for a particular time period.
Brave New Cartography
Poverty mapping using GIS capabilities is being sponsored by governments and nongovernmental organizations on every continent. In a bid to promote the use of poverty maps by United Nations (UN) member states and organizations as well as nongovernmental organizations-particularly in the areas of food security and environmental management-the government of Norway has funded the Poverty Mapping initiative, which is run by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Arendal (Norway) office of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)/Global Resource Information Database (GRID), and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Similarly, the World Bank has sponsored the creation of numerous national and regional poverty maps to be used as policy tools.
The most useful maps show poverty at a district or community level, rather than on a national scale. These higher-resolution maps can reveal poor regions and communities that may disappear among wealthier areas at lower resolution. Higher-resolution maps can more closely tie population to specific spatial features...