Unequal World

The platform is designed to be discoverable; this guide is a quick orientation.

Entry: the globe

The platform opens mid-story on the Economy tab: a Gini-index choropleth with animated financial-flow arcs and inflection pins already active, so the first thing a visitor sees demonstrates what the tool does. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, click any country for its panel, or switch tabs. (Photo-city markers for the Unequal Scenes aerial archive surface on the Health tab.)

Tabs

Six tabs in the header: four topical (Health, Economy, Urbanization, Planet), plus Data Stories and About.

1. Health. Photo cities visible. Click a marker to open the city profile: aerial photography, satellite layers, a 100 m exposome heat map, and the relevant World Bank country-level data with Data360 provenance links. US cities add a 1937 "redlining" overlay (HOLC A to D grades from Mapping Inequality, over today's city). Brain age (our modelled exposome layer, grounded in Legaz et al. 2026, Nature Medicine, and developed with the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin with the support of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development) is preserved here as the platform's scientific anchor, labelled in-app as a model, not a measurement.
2. Economy. Globe re-colours as a Gini-index choropleth by default. Pick from four economy indicators (Gini, Poverty under $2.15/day, GDP per capita PPP, Internet users). Drag the time slider from 1980 to 2024 and watch the choropleth animate. Gold pins mark documented policy interventions (Bolsa Família, Đổi Mới, India 1991, South Africa 1994); click to read the story and verify against Data360. Press "Show financial flows" to overlay animated ODA, Remittances, FDI and Carbon arcs from the Mechanism lens: the same data, two visualisations.
3. Urbanization. Globe choropleth on urban population %, with sibling indicators for slum share, electricity access, and internet penetration. The time slider scrubs decades; annotations cover JNNURM, M-Pesa, South Africa's national electrification, and India's Jal Jeevan Mission.
4. Planet. Globe choropleth on CO2 emissions per capita, with sibling indicators for forest area and renewable electricity output. Same time slider and inflection / divergence pins as the other topical tabs.
5. Data Stories. Opens a side panel of immersive scrollytelling stories: The Reverse Flow (global financial flows), Buenos Aires (exposome divide), Lagos (unequal expansion), and Johannesburg (Primrose / Makause), each built on real Google Earth Engine satellite data, and toggles pulsing story pins on the globe.

AI insights: click any country

On any tab, click a country polygon to open its panel. The top section, "How [country] defies its peers" (AI, cross-referenced), lists up to three lines where that economy most departs from its income-level and region peers (ahead ▲ / behind ▼), each with a Data360 verify chip. The panel also shows IMF and UNICEF federated values, and a subnational poverty drill-down (WB GSAP) that ranks the country's admin-1 regions by their $3.65/day headcount, exposing within-country inequality a national number hides (for example, a country's poorest province running several times the capital's poverty rate). This turns every click into a new, source-sealed insight rather than a static read-out, the platform's core information-integrity feature.

Toggling "Show inflections" on any topical tab adds two kinds of AI pin to the globe: algorithmic inflection points (where a country's series measurably bent) and distinct teal "↕" divergence pins (countries where two indicators that move together globally broke apart, for example Lesotho's GDP rising while life expectancy fell). Clicking a divergence pin graphs both series with a verify chip for each.

Embedding the globe in an article (for journalists)

Use URL parameters to deep-link directly to a view:

• ?city=sao-paulo opens the São Paulo city profile on load
• ?country=BRA spins the globe to Brazil
• ?story=buenos-aires redirects to the Buenos Aires scrollytelling story
• ?embed=1 hides the header chrome and CTA for clean iframe embedding
• Combine: ?city=lagos&embed=1 for a clean Lagos-focused embed

Compare Inflections + Compare Countries

The persistent "Compare Inflections" button (bottom-right of the globe) is the primary comparison tool: assemble 2 to 4 turning points (curated policy stories, global events, or algorithmically-detected bends), read a deterministic synthesis of what they share, and trace each back to its Data360 indicator. From inside that overlay, "Compare countries on a WDI table instead" switches to the secondary mode: pick up to four economies and compare them cell-by-cell, every value verifiable against its Data360 indicator.