ArticleNature communications2022
Estimating global economic well-being with unlit settlements.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social implications of the 30×30 global conservation target.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Global high-resolution estimates of the UN Human Development Index using satellite imagery and machine learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Detecting gaps between urban expansion and lighting infrastructure growth using daytime and nighttime satellite imagery.International journal of applied earth observation and geoinformation : ITC journal · 2026Article
- Mapping fine-scale socioeconomic inequality using machine learning and remotely sensed data.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Energy-poverty-inequality SDGs: A large-scale household analysis and forecasting in China.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Global high-resolution growth projections dataset for rooftop area consistent with the shared socioeconomic pathways, 2020-2050.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Spatial spillovers of violent conflict amplify the impacts of climate variability on malaria risk in sub-Saharan Africa.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- How poverty is measured impacts who gets classified as impoverished.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global poverty estimation using private and public sector big data sources.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Tracking electricity losses and their perceived causes using nighttime light and social media.iScience · 2023Article
- Quantifying the Variability of Ground Light Sources and Their Relationships with Spaceborne Observations of Night Lights Using Multidirectional and Multispectral Measurements.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Estimating global economic well-being with unlit settlements.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
15 authors at 7 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is well established that nighttime radiance, measured from satellites, correlates with economic prosperity across the globe. In developing countries, areas with low levels of detected radiance generally indicate limited development - with unlit areas typically being disregarded. Here we combine satellite nighttime lights and the world settlement footprint for the year 2015 to show that 19% of the total settlement footprint of the planet had no detectable artificial radiance associated with it. The majority of unlit settlement footprints are found in Africa (39%), rising to 65% if we consider only rural settlement areas, along with numerous countries in the Middle East and Asia. Significant areas of unlit settlements are also located in some developed countries. For 49 countries spread across Africa, Asia and the Americas we are able to predict and map the wealth class obtained from ~2,400,000 geo-located households based upon the percent of unlit settlements, with an overall accuracy of 87%.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.