Demographics & Population

46 demographic indicators are fetched from the World Bank Indicators API and UN Population Division datasets. Series include population totals, growth rates, fertility rates, life expectancy, migration net flows, age structure distributions, and urbanization metrics.

ISO-3166 country codes from the data APIs are joined to Natural Earth GeoJSON country polygons at 50 m and 110 m resolution. Each polygon feature is enriched with the full demographic attribute set for the selected indicator and year.

Each demographic indicator is normalized using min-max scaling across all 195 countries for the current reference year. Log-scale normalization is applied for highly skewed distributions (e.g., population totals) to prevent large countries from dominating the color range.

For population density layers, gridded population data (GPW v4 / WorldPop) is binned into H3 hexagonal cells at resolution 3–5. H3 density provides sub-country granularity, revealing within-country population concentration patterns invisible at the country level.

UN bilateral migration stock data (origin/destination pairs) is converted to great-circle arcs with stroke width and color scaled to migration volume. Arcs are culled to the top N flows per selected region to maintain visual clarity on the globe.

Country polygons color-coded by the active demographic layer, H3 density hexagons, and migration arcs are composited on a globe.gl WebGL globe. Layer switching, year scrubbing, and country click-through for full indicator profiles are all handled in real time.