About this project
Mapping Who Is Actually Greening
This project joins NASA MODIS NDVI satellite measurements with World Bank income tiers to test whether richer countries green faster. The analysis covers 166 countries with stable 2000 to 2024 records and uses each country's own 2000 to 2005 mean as its baseline.
The expected wealth gradient does not appear. Low, lower middle, upper middle, and high income groups finish within 1.6 percentage points of one another. Variation within each tier is far larger than variation between tiers, and the fastest gains and losses occur at opposite ends of the income ladder.
Why this matters
If greening tracked wealth, environmental recovery would look like a privilege of rich nations. It does not. The result points toward geography, water availability, and land use, and makes recovery look broader and more actionable than the original hypothesis suggested.
How to interpret the maps
On the vegetation maps, higher NDVI generally indicates greener, denser, or healthier plant cover. On the change map, green cells represent an increase in NDVI and orange cells represent a decrease. Spike height represents vegetation intensity on the vegetation maps and the magnitude of change on the change map.
Data
Vegetation comes from NASA MODIS Terra NDVI. Country level change is measured against a stable 2000 to 2005 baseline and joined by ISO3 code to World Bank FY2024 to 2025 income classifications. This observational analysis tests association, not a complete causal model.
Team
Sonali Shyma · DSC 80, UC San Diego