Future population projections
We have developed future population projections for Africa (the rest of the world to come) based on Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). The RCPs and SSPs where created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their fifth assessment report as a way of dividing the future scenarios. The SSPs includes country-level urban and rural population projections, while the RCPs are based on radiative forcing caused by greenhouse gases, aerosols and associated land-use change. To be able to use the RCPs and SSPs projections together in earth system models they must be at the same spatial scale. We filled this need by creating a high resolution (~1 km) spatial gridded population dataset which considers both the RCP urban fractions and SSP population projection. The dataset is annually and spans between 2000 and 2100 for the 15 most probable ssp-rcp scenario combinations.
Data is available at DataGURU [link] and the publication can be found here (http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2016130)
Data can also be visualized at: https://niklasbokeolen.shinyapps.io/Shiny_population/
Figure, Projected population for Africa year 2050 under scenario RCP 4.5 SSP 2