WorldPop

WorldPop is a research group in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton that produces data on where people live and who they are, at high spatial resolution.¹ It began in October 2013 by combining the AfriPop, AsiaPop and AmeriPop projects.¹ Its staff of around 40 are researchers, data scientists and specialists.¹ It works with governments and UN agencies, combining satellite, survey, cellphone and other geospatial data.¹

Its main products are gridded population estimates: counts of people for each cell of a regular grid rather than for each district.² The cells can be added up over any area, such as a hospital's catchment, including areas that cross the boundaries a census reports by.² "Top-down" datasets take census counts and official projections for administrative areas and spread them over the 100 m or 1 km cells classed as settled, guided by detailed geospatial data.² The official totals are kept, and the estimates include breakdowns by age and sex.² "Bottom-up" datasets instead build a statistical model from recent surveys, for countries where the last census is old or incomplete, and map their uncertainty, usually for a single year.²

The current multi-year release, called Global2 (R2025A), gives population counts for every country at 100 m and 1 km, and global mosaics at 1 km, for each year from 2015 to 2030.^2,3 The older Global1 series for 2000 to 2020 is archived.³ Bespoke 100 m estimates for single countries and a single recent year, made with governments and UN agencies, are in the WorldPop Open Population Repository (WOPR).³ Datasets are updated when new census or geospatial data become available, and each download page gives its production date.⁴

The data is free and open under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, for commercial and non-commercial use with attribution.^1,4 Grids come as GeoTIFF files, which any GIS software reads, and many datasets also as CSV tables.⁴ The REST API needs no login up to 1,000 calls a day; heavier users can request a key after registering.⁵ WorldPop asks that the data not be used to discriminate against, exploit, surveil or otherwise harm people, and holds users solely responsible for how they use it.¹

For someone modelling a place, WorldPop gives an estimate of how many people live inside any outline drawn on a map, such as a flood zone, for any year in the series.^2,3 The counts are modelled estimates, and WorldPop says they do not replace a full census.² Its subnational data underpins UN estimates of how many people are affected by disasters and conflicts.¹