Socio-economic Theme Page

Introduction - purpose of theme page

The South African landscape is characterised by diverse, unequal and often harsh socio-economic realities. The socio-economic theme page is primarily focussed on giving users of the South African Risk and Vulnerability Atlas an indication of growth patterns and dynamics of population and economic activity across the South African landscape. These socio-economic contexts, as well as key temporal and spatial trends influencing them, are imperative in considering: possible impacts of natural and human risks and hazards on socio-ecological systems; the vulnerability of such systems; and coping capacities of different regions and communities. [Read more...]

Socio-economic dynamics, vulnerability and adaptive capacity

The socio-economic theme page highlights critical aspects related to the spatial manifestation of socio-economic development dynamics and vulnerabilities in order to enable an exploration of the relationships and interactions between socio-economic development and the natural environment as integrated systems. The analyses conducted by CSIR, BE (Planning Support Systems) for the theme page, includes (i)  a brief overview of a range of national and regional level analyses and indicators of socio-economic dynamics and spatial trends influencing social vulnerability and resilience;  [Read more...]   as well as (ii)  a comparative analyses of local municipal (LM) level socio-economic vulnerability and coping capacity, by making use of combined indexes based on the above mentioned social and economic indicators. [Read more...]

Spatial analysis platforms and studies informing the analyses

The overview analysis in this section is based on, and draws from research and numerous studies done over the last couple of years conducted by the Planning Support Systems unit within the CSIR (BE) in collaboration with government and other partners. These include: the National Spatial Trends Overview, 2009 conducted for the South African Cities Network, former Department of Provincial and Local Government and The Presidency; the socio-economic analysis in the regional profiler developed as part of the StepSA portal with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Human Science Research Council (HSRC); the Geospatial Analysis Platform (2006) developed with The Presidency and the Department of Trade and Industry, and the National Spatial Development Perspective (2006) updated for the Presidency. The analysis can also be augmented and read in conjunction with the published Human Settlement Atlas (2010) developed for the department of Human Settlement and the Territorial Review (2010) conducted for The Presidency.

The socio-economic theme page reflects analyses based on local municipal level data sets as well as on an innovative geospatial analysis platform (GAP) developed by the CSIR in 2006 enabling relational regional analyses across boundaries (in units known as mesozones) and updated in 2010. The 2011 outputs on the socio-economic theme reflect the latest upgrade of the geospatial analysis platform and data sets (2010 and 2011). As such, the socio-economic theme page provides Atlas users with updated, mesozone-scale information on the geographical distribution of population and economic activity across the country.