The Center for International Earth Science Information Network has released an atlas entitled Where the Poor Are: An Atlas of Poverty. The atlas, available as a pdf download, covers a number of aspects of poverty including infnat mortality, hunger, poverty gaps and inequality and looks at these factors on both a global, regional and national scale, the latter being broken down by subnational jurisdictions to varying degrees of refinement. The maps are mostly choropleth maps. The atlas can also be requested in hard copy format.

From the atlas web page: “According to Marc Levy, Associate Director for Science Applications at CIESIN, these maps and data sets help broaden the understanding of the relationship between poverty and geography — beyond the more common urban-rural framework. ‘The revolutionary advances in poverty mapping have made it possible to be precise about things we used to only generalize about,’ says Levy. ‘Connections between poverty and climatic conditions, soil fertility, exposure to natural disasters, access to transportation networks, and other important drivers, are beginning to come into sharp relief.’”

Much of the data used in the creation of the atlas maps are also available in shapefile format.

By way of Declan Butler, Reporter