Maplecroft is a UK organization specializing in the coverage of the non-financial performance of global corporations and governments. Issues of convern include human rights, corporate governance and responsibility, the environment, and resource sustainability. Maplecroft crafts standard report documents, but presents its findings in an unusual way: it makes maps.
Maplecroft maps encompass the results of their work on responsibility and sustainability, along with material from more specialized groups like Amnesty International, the UN Development Program, and International Telecommunications Union. The maps appear to be updated relatively frequently, so few will contain substantively out-of-date information. They do require Flash, and I found the links to data explanations to be unresponsive on two different browsers. Nonetheless, most of the material is either self-explanatory or explained in the sidebar, and clicking on a given country will pull up an additional menu of information.
Some maps worth checking out include hunger, natural disasters, and human rights -- just updated for International Human Rights Day.
As with any information resource, it's important to pay attention to what sorts of interpretations are in use. The Landmine Risk map, for example, doesn't emphasize the number of deployed landmines nearly as much as whether or not a given nation is a signatory to anti-landmine treaties. This results in the somewhat non-sensical presentation of the United States as having an equivalent landmine risk to Cambodia.
(Via NextBillion.net)
