Dataset with article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14386-x ( https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14386-x ).

Despite its small land coverage, urban land and its expansion can have profound impacts on global environments. Therefore, a proper understanding of how future urban land change will affect other land covers is important to alleviate the social and environmental problems that challenge the sustainable developments of human societies. Recently, The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) were adopted by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), enabling researchers to conduct unified, comparable multi-scenario simulations and integrate such simulation products into climate change research. The SSPs focus on the key socio-economic factors including demographic dynamics, economic development, technological change, social, cultural, and institutional changes and policies. Here, we present the scenario projections of global urban land expansion under the framework of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) every 10 years from 2015 to 2100. Our projections feature a fine spatial resolution of 1 km that preserves spatial details and avoids potential distortions in urban land patterns. The objective is to enable the assessment of different scenarios of future urban expansion and their related impacts on a global scale under the latest recognized SSP scenarios.