LONDON (AlertNet)
A Dutch organisation has come up with a novel way to put the Millennium Development Goals for slashing global poverty on the map – by showing how the world would look if countries were sized in proportion to various development indicators.
Call it the hall-of-mirrors approach to cartography. View rich countries in terms of aid given as a percentage of gross national income, and the United States looks wizened and tiny. Look at the world in terms of HIV/AIDS rates, and sub-Saharan Africa swells like a balloon.
The maps were created by Mapping Worlds, a Dutch organisation founded by the Dutch National Committee for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development.
The group aims to raise global awareness of development-related issues through innovative cartography and has come up with hall-of-mirror maps for all eight of the U.N.-sponsored Millennium Development Goals aimed at cutting poverty and improving education and health over the next 10 years.
The series shows countries distorted in proportion to development aid, debt, education rates, gender equality, child mortality and HIV/AIDS, while other maps on the website focus on migration and people displaced in and around western Sudan.
Original article : http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/112135734160.htm
The maps can be viewed here : http://www.mappingworlds.nl/milldevgoals.html
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