These words denote paramount human and environmental concerns for the 21st Century.  The Urbanization and Global Change Group at Yale University works at the intersection of these three concepts.   Examining rapidly urbanizing regions around the world, with a focus on China and India, our research aims to uncover the drivers behind urbanization, the role of globalization in the urban process and the environmental impacts of urban land expansion.   We are interested both in understanding fundamental processes to advance academic knowledge and in crafting rules-of-thumb for policy application.

The four fundamental questions we address are: How urban areas have grown in the past?  What drives urban land expansion?  How and where will urban areas likely expand in the future?  What are the environmental impacts of urban land expansion?  Methodologically, we employ remote sensing analysis, geographic information science, statistics, systems modeling, stakeholder interviews, fieldwork and historical assessments.  Our projects include:

• Using remote sensing to monitor urban land expansion
• Understanding the interaction among policy, land-use, and environmental change
• Simulating and forecasting urban expansion
• Understanding the environmental impacts of land-use change