SO YOU鈥橵E hitch-hiked through Central America, stalked rare beasts in Madagascar and trekked your way through northern Chile. You鈥檙e pretty well travelled, even if you do say so yourself. Before you get ideas about being an intrepid explorer, however, consider this. For all their wide open spaces and seeming wildernesses, none of these places can be described as remote in 2009.
In fact, very little of the world鈥檚 land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness created by researchers at the European Commission鈥檚 in Ispra, Italy, and the .
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The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.
Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world鈥檚 land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What鈥檚 more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city 鈥� around the same proportion as Canada鈥檚 Quebec province.
鈥淐hina鈥檚 flourishing export trade is clearly seen, with some of the world鈥檚 busiest shipping lanes鈥�
The maps were created to show how the distribution of people affects their access to resources such as education and medical care, and how we are increasingly pushing wildlife out of even the wildest corners of our planet. And with this as a baseline, Alan Belward, who leads the project, hopes to follow how emerging economies will change the face of the world, for better or for worse: 鈥淭he true value will be in doing the map again.鈥�
