Large disagreements in estimates of urban land across scales and their implications

Abstract Improvements in high-resolution satellite remote sensing and computational advancements have sped up the development of global datasets that delineate urban land, crucial for understanding climate risks in our increasingly urbanizing world. Here, we analyze urban land cover patterns across spatiotemporal scales from several such current-generation products. While all the datasets show a rapidly urbanizing world, with global urban land nearly tripling between 1985 and 2015, there are substantial discrepancies in urban land area estimates among them influenced by scale, differing urban definitions, and methodologies. We discuss the implications of these discrepancies for several use cases, including for monitoring urban climate risks and for modeling urbanization-induced impacts on weather and climate from regional to global scales. Our results demonstrate the importance of choosing fit for purpose datasets for examining specific aspects of historical, present, and future urbanization with implications for sustainable development, resource allocation, and quantification of climate impacts.