Millions have been displaced due to conflicts in the Middle East this year. This interactive map helps visualize it.
A man holds a placard as Syrian and Afghan refugees demand to travel to Germany in September 2015. Image Source: Flickr/AFP
In 2015, unending bloodshed in Syria as well as reignited conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan pushed millions of people to find a new life in a new country. Over the past year, nearly 800,000 refugees and asylum seekers have fled to Europe, hoping to restart in a continent of peace that has maintained relative prosperity even during the recent financial crisis. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of beleaguered men, women, and children has tested the European Union.
To breathe life into what can be a bland recitation of data points, Ville Saarinen and Juho Ojala, of the Finnish data analytics firm Lucify, created the stunning visualization below. It uses monthly, origin-destination data on asylum seekers from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to map the flow of people seeking sanctuary in the European Union. As Saarinen and Ojala write, “The visualisation is designed to provide an intuitive grasp of the scale of the problem.”
Each white spark shooting over the dark map represents 25 refugees. Readers can hover over the map to reveal more information, such as flows from a single origin country or cumulative data from a single destination.
As the creators explain in a post on Medium, the map has some limitations. It does not show migration routes, but only final destinations. Furthermore, it does not necessarily show the accurate length of time of each journey. Instead, the creators decided on randomizing the travel time to between 4-6 km per hour to calculate start dates for refugees. As they write, this speed reflects the weeks or months it can take a Syrian refugee to leave his home and arrive in northern Europe.
The Lucify team made these decisions based on what was needed to tell the story of the data in the most compelling way. The results are impressive. They show the dramatic consequences of a conflict and economic desperation, particularly the disastrous effects of four years of ceaseless war in Syria.
The post This Stunning Interactive Map Visualizes 800,000 Refugees Entering Europe appeared first on All That Is Interesting.