THE GLOBAL HUMAN SETTLEMENT LAYER FROM LANDSAT IMAGERY

The growth of the built environment is a global environmental change processes that can be measured and monitored with Earth Observation. That growth is expected to continue as populations continue to both increase and urbanize. The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project was set up to measure and monitor the global built up environment and its changes [1]. The GHSL layers presented herein are derived by processing the global archive of Landsat imagery dating back to 1975. GHSL from Landsat include four global built up information layers corresponding to epochs: 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2014 [2]. The geo-information generated is used in a wide variety of applications that include the generation of urbanization statistics, to quantify exposure to natural hazards for disaster risk and early warning models, to derive global fine scale population density grids, and to generate indicators to monitor targets for main international framework agreements.