Waikato University researcher wins funding to help
university-of-waikato
Thu Apr 12 2007 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Waikato University researcher wins funding to help
Thursday, 12 April 2007, 12:59 am
Press Release: University of Waikato
MEDIA RELEASE
12 April 2007
Waikato University researcher wins funding to help measure poverty
Nine and a half million pictures could hold the key to figuring out the best way to help China’s 100 million poorest citizens, and the methodology to analyse this data has been developed right here in New Zealand. Up until now, the problem has been how to link up Kiwi expertise with the huge volume of data to be analysed. But that’s all about to change.
Professor John Gibson of the University of Waikato Management School has just won $200,000 in funding over three years from the Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ) to access a high capacity, ultra-high speed computer network so that New Zealand social scientists can participate in a project to map poverty and environmental change in China.
The project will use KAREN, the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network, to link up with experts at Stanford University in the United States and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to analyse high-resolution satellite imagery from China.
It’s one of ten projects to receive support in the first round of the REANNZ Capability Build Fund.
“China is the one of the few countries in the world where high-quality satellite images of every square kilometre can be used to understand how unfavourable environments contribute to rural poverty,” says Professor Gibson. “That’s 9.6 million pictures in total.”
Each one square kilometre parcel of land has been mapped three times since 1988, providing what Prof Gibson says is an unparalleled resource for integrating environmental factors with poverty mapping analyses.
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Prof Gibson has pioneered this type of analysis for a much smaller country, Papua New Guinea. “Using the KAREN network, we’ll now be able to apply similar analyses to the much larger quantity of data available in China,” he says.
The researchers will be able to isolate geographical and environmental factors that contribute to poverty and low levels of of household consumption and income. “Ultimately, we should be able to accurately pinpoint small areas for targeting poverty alleviation measures,” says Prof Gibson.
He says there’s huge interest across the world in research to tackle poverty, and the project will give New Zealand researchers and the KAREN network valuable international exposure.
Prof Gibson says the project may also pave the way for research into how New Zealand pastoral technologies might help tackle environmental degradation in China, or how developments in rural China might impact on New Zealand’s economy once the expected Free Trade Agreement is signed.
Prof Gibson is a member of an expert group advising the United Nations Statistical Division on poverty measurement. The other research team members from Waikato University include Prof Jacques Poot of the Population Studies Centre and Dr Bonggeun Kim of the Economics Department.
ENDS
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