NASA LCLUC Central Asia Webinar Series #5
This session will feature Dr. Kirsten de Beurs (University of Oklahoma)
The New Silk road, an enhanced transportation corridor, will traverse the most populous and most fertile agricultural regions of Central Asia. Competition between urban growth and croplands, and their induced interaction, often enhances the risk of disease epidemics. This is an acute concern for Central Asia, where existing health and sanitary conditions compound risks of emerging infectious diseases. In our study, we focus on the effect of large, sustained, foreign economic investments spanning four different Central Asian countries.
We link urban development with changing demographic conditions, regional economic integration, and population health risks of zoonotic and vector borne diseases. We have selected nine cities for analysis in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. For each city we analyze the urban land use and development over a 25-year period, as well as cropland changes in the immediate surroundings of the city. Building height and density are determined based on very high-resolution data, which we link with radar data. We also use land surface temperature to identify urban heat islands and nightlight data as a proxy for economic development. Lastly, we developed a systematic method to identify road networks, and we present historical road maps between 1995 and 2020. We also contextualize our remotely sensed findings with qualitative and quantitative social science research. To do this, we have paired microeconomic data from publicly available household surveys and macroeconomic indicators with our satellite-based measures. We have also constructed our own survey instrument and intend to collect information this Fall at the intra-city level regarding economics development, health and sanitation, attitudes and beliefs, and perceptions of the local impacts of the BRI. Our project started about one year ago, and in this talk we will address preliminary results for two cities (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and Bukhara, Uzbekistan).