New Zealand is culturally diverse. Even at a regional level, there are big differences in ethnic composition… and with an increasingly inter-connected world, ethnic composition is expected to change substantially in the future, particularly in Auckland.

Statistics New Zealand has provided us with sub-national ethnic population projections, by age and sex, from 2013 to 2038 which are well suited to visualisation using stacked area charts. The package ggplot2 in R makes generating these easy.

The following projections assume ‘medium fertility, medium paternity, medium mortality, medium net migration, and medium net inter-ethnic mobility.’ This is considered ‘medium growth’*.

Total New Zealand

Total North Island

Total South Island

Auckland

*Please see http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz for more information.

References:

Data:

Subnational ethnic population projections, by age and sex, 2013(base)-2038. Statistics New Zealand. Provided under the creative commons attribution 3.0 New Zealand license.

I have transformed the data into proportions.

Plotting:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5030389/getting-a-stacked-area-plot-in-r

http://www.cookbook-r.com/Graphs/Axes_%28ggplot2%29/