Analysing the regional geography of poverty, austerity and inequality in Europe: a human cartographic perspective. Regional Studies. This paper presents a human cartographic approach to the analysis of the impact of austerity and the economic crisis across Europe’s regions. It reflects on past insights and debates on the analysis and mapping of poverty and wealth, and of the effects of austerity in particular. It then presents a wide range of cartograms highlighting social and spatial inequalities across Europe. Finally, the paper highlights the increasingly important role of the field of regional studies in current debates about the future of the European project and of the possibility of a Europe of regions rather than a Europe of nation-states.

This is the first human geography social atlas of Europe to consider the European economy, culture, history and human and physical geography as a single land ma...

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Rising temperatures, changing precipitation and more weather extremes pose risks to local societies worldwide. Yet, climate change is most often presented and reported on a global or national scale. This paper aims to analyze the key aspects of climate change on the local scale by assessing temporal and spatial changes in temperature and precipitation in the Westfjords in north-western Iceland and evaluate their impacts on the region’s livability. Existing temperature and precipitation data were used to model trends in climate change at an unprecedented resolution. The results show that the period of 2001–2020 was warmer than the 1961–1990 reference period in almost every month of every year, and that warming was more pronounced in the winter months. Furthermore, precipitation increased during 1991–2020 period compared to 1961–1990. These detected local patterns confirm some of the major predictions about climate change on the global scale. Considering the impact of climate change at the local level is critical, as it allows the community to envisage their future and provides better possibilities to mitigate, prepare for or adapt to the predicted changes.

The assessment of natural events that can turn into disasters where people live is usually accompanied by maps visualising the specific topic in its spatial setting and putting the physical environment into the main focus. Such conventional mapping approaches, however, can often fail to give an intuitive understanding of the underlying quantitative dimension of the associated risk to people and a fuller appreciation of the interrelation between humans and their natural environment. The method presented here demonstrates an alternative way of mapping environmental risk. A gridded cartogram approach is introduced and illustrated with examples drawn from data documenting globally significant earthquakes that have occurred since 2150 BC. Gridded cartograms are a new map projection. They are created by starting with an equally distributed grid onto which a density-equalising cartogram technique is applied. Each individual grid cell is resized according to specific quantitative information. The underlying grid ensures the preservation of an accurate geographic reference to the real world. It allows gridded cartograms to be used as basemaps, new projections, onto which other information can be mapped. Earthquake intensity on a gridded population cartogram highlights those zones where most people live in these risk environments and minimises information about where earthquakes still occur, but where they matter less for human populations. Gridded cartograms also allow any other quantitative data to be used in the actual transformation. This is demonstrated with gridded cartograms from earthquake intensity data, resulting in very unusual depictions and new perspectives of the surface of the planet.