Understanding the demographic implications of climate change: estimates of localized population predictions under future scenarios of sea-level rise

Significant advances have been made to understand the interrelationship between humans and the environment in recent years, yet research has not produced useful localized estimates that link population forecasts to environmental change. Coarse, static population estimates that have little information on projected growth or spatial variability mask substantial impacts of environmental change on especially vulnerable populations. We estimate that 20 million people in the United States will be affected by sea-level rise by 2030 in selected regions that represent a range of sociodemographic characteristics and corresponding risks of vulnerability. Our results show that the impact of sea-level rise extends beyond the directly impacted counties due to migration networks that link inland and coastal areas and their populations. Substantial rates of population growth and migration are serious considerations for developing mitigation, adaptation, and planning strategies, and for future research on the social, demographic, and political dimensions of climate change.     

Divorce,Separation, and Housing Changes: A Multiprocess Analysis of Longitudinal Data from England and Wales

This study investigates the effect of marital and nonmarital separation on individuals’ residential and housing trajectories. Using rich data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and applying multilevel competing-risks event history models, we analyze the risk of a move of single, married, cohabiting, and separated men and women to different housing types. We distinguish moves due to separation from moves of separated people and account for unobserved codeterminants of moving and separation risks. Our analysis shows that many individuals move due to separation, as expected, but that the likelihood of moving is also relatively high among separated individuals. We find that separation has a long-term effect on individuals’ residential careers. Separated women exhibit high moving risks regardless of whether they moved out of the joint home upon separation, whereas separated men who did not move out upon separation are less likely to move. Interestingly, separated women are most likely to move to terraced houses, whereas separated men are equally likely to move to flats (apartments) and terraced (row) houses, suggesting that family structure shapes moving patterns of separated individuals.     

Estimating Recent Local Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on Current Real-Estate Losses: A Housing Market Case Study in Miami-Dade,Florida

Sea-Level Rise (SLR) Projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) indicate increasing, and imminent, risk to coastal communities from tidal flooding and hurricane storm surge. Building on recent research related to the potential demographic impacts of such changes (Hauer et al. 2016, in Nat Clim Chang 3:802–806, 2017; Neumann et al. 2015; Curtis and Schneider in Popul Environ 33:28–54, 2011), localized flooding projections in the Miami Beach area (Wdowinski et al. in Ocean Coast Manag 126:1–8, 2016) and projected economic losses associated with this rise in projected SLR (Fu et al. Ocean Coast Manag 133:11–17, 2016); this research investigates the accrued current cost, in terms of real-estate dollars lost, due to recurrent tidal flooding and projected increases of flooding in Miami-Dade County. Most directly related to this line of research, Keenan et al. (2018) have recently produced results indicating that Climate Gentrification is taking place in Miami, FL with higher elevations in flood prone areas appreciating at a higher rate. In that vein of thinking, we seek to answer a question posed by such research: What is the actual accrued loss to sea-level rise over the recent past? To answer this question, we replicate well-documented estimation methods by combining publicly available sea-level rise projections, tide gauge trends, and property lot elevation data to identify areas regularly at risk of flooding. Combining recent patterns of flooding inundation with future forecasts, we find that properties projected to be inundated with tidal flooding in 2032 have lost $3.08 each year on each square foot of living area, and properties near roads that will be inundated with tidal flooding in 2032 have lost $3.71 each year on each square foot of living area. These effects total over $465 million in lost real-estate market value between 2005 and 2016 in the Miami-Dade area.     

Coordinated approaches to large-scale movements of people: contributions of the Paris Agreement and the Global Compacts for migration and on refugees

It is not yet clear how climate change will affect the structural constraints and spatial and social complexity that affect population movements in the future. Today, countries of origin, transit, and destination have reached a juncture. The UNFCCC Paris Agreement adds value to decisions these countries face by helping them explore possible scenarios for impacts that include large movements of people that could be associated with a rise in global average temperatures between 1.5 and 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Climate policy and mainstream migration and refugee policy are developing recommendations by the end of 2018 that, together, will provide new contours for governing human mobility in the twenty-first century. This paper compares work on human mobility under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and how climate change features in the initial drafts of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR). The international community can choose not to include such future considerations, missing opportunities to avert risks of involuntary movements of people as climate change impacts intensify. Alternatively, the international community can help countries to preempt risks arising from governance gaps and climate impacts, incorporate climate and mobility considerations in planning, and establish contingency arrangements for large-scale movements of people. A measure of efficacy in coordinating responses to large-scale movements of people will be the degree to which both state and non-state actors take up the recommendations of the Task Force on Displacement, how the Global Compact for Migration is negotiated, and the degree to which states utilize the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework as climate and other dynamics unfold in future years.     

Impacts of population change on vulnerability and the capacity to adapt to climate change and variability: a typology based on lessons from “a hard country”

This article describes and analyzes the impacts of population and demographic change on the vulnerability of communities to climate change and variability. It begins with a review of existing literature on the effects of population change on anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the exposure of settlements to climate risks, and on the capacity to adapt to climate change. The article explores the relationship between population change and adaptive capacity through detailed examination of empirical findings from a study of small communities in eastern Ontario, Canada currently experiencing a combination of changes in local climatic conditions and rapid demographic change caused by in-migration of urban retirees and out-migration of young, educated people. The combination of changing demographic and climatic patterns has placed increased stress on local social networks that have long been critical to climate adaptation in that region. The case study and literature review are used to create a general typology of the relationship between population change and vulnerability that may be used as a framework for future research in this field.     

Community development in a Mexican squatter settlement: A program evaluation

This paper critically examines various approaches to community development in Mexican squatter settlements. Using a quasi-experimental design, the authors show systematic differences between government-sponsored and spontaneous squatter communities. Results suggest that residents in the non-government squatter settlement are not disadvantaged in their ability to construct adequate housing or to obtain resources similar to those living in government-sponsored communities. Government-sponsored settlements, however, showed significantly higher levels of collective action and community building than those that were spontaneously formed. The authors conclude with suggestions for improving the social and physical conditions of squatters.     

Community development in a Mexican squatter settlement: A program evaluation

This paper critically examines various approaches to community development in Mexican squatter settlements. Using a quasi-experimental design, the authors show systematic differences between government-sponsored and spontaneous squatter communities. Results suggest that residents in the non-government squatter settlement are not disadvantaged in their ability to construct adequate housing or to obtain resources similar to those living in government-sponsored communities. Government-sponsored settlements, however, showed significantly higher levels of collective action and community building than those that were spontaneously formed. The authors conclude with suggestions for improving the social and physical conditions of squatters.     

未来全国和不同区域人口城镇化水平预测

城镇化将是我国未来几十年社会经济发展的动力之一。从人口学的角度讲,在加速城镇化过程中,人口三大因素,即出生、死亡、迁移的变化中,人口城乡迁移将是核心问题。本文在城镇化发展的中方案假设下,利用ⅡASA的模型对全国和地区未来30年人口城镇化水平进行预测。结果显示了全国和不同区域的城镇化长期趋势;揭示了城乡间的迁移和农村居民身份的改变,是城镇地区人口高速增长的重要因素。伴随城镇化的加速,农村地区人口老龄化速度快于城市。     

A SRES-based gridded global population dataset for 1990–2100

Spatially explicit population data can play an important role in studies on environment and sustainability. Several gridded datasets on the present population exist, but global data on future populations are largely lacking. This paper presents a dataset covering three global population forecasts for the period 1990–2100 at 0.5-degrees resolution. The basis for these forecasts is the SRES scenarios developed for the IPCC climate-modeling framework. In addition, a gridded dataset of urban and rural populations for the period 1990–2050 is presented. To illustrate how the datasets can be used, future changes in population density and urbanization were analyzed for some of the world’s major river basins. This analysis shows that the population density in the Ganges basin, which is already very high, is likely to increase considerably. The highest future increase rates were found in some African and Middle-Eastern basins. The population dataset for 2015 was compared with one previously published gridded dataset. The comparison shows some differences in population density, mainly in small, highly urbanized coastal river basins, while for large basins, the two datasets agree fairly well. We hope that the datasets here presented will prove to be a useful resource also for other researchers of global environmental change and sustainable development.     

Impacts of Demographic Trends on US Household Size and Structure

We use a household projection model to construct future scenarios for the United States designed to reflect a wide but plausible range of outcomes, including a new set of scenarios for union formation and dissolution rates based on past trends, experience in other countries, and current theory. The period covered is from 2000 to 2100. We find that the percentage of people living in households headed by the elderly may climb from 11 percent in 2000 to 20–31 percent in 2050 and 20–39 percent in 2100, while the average size of households could plausibly be as low as 2.0 or as high as 3.1 by the second half of the century. We assess the sensitivity of household size and structure to various demographic events, and show that outcomes are most sensitive to changes in fertility rates and rates of union formation and dissolution. They are less sensitive to the timing of marriage and childbearing and to changes in life expectancy.     

Slum Residence and Child Health in Developing Countries

Continued population growth and increasing urbanization have led to the formation of large informal urban settlements in many developing countries in recent decades. The high prevalence of poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation observed in these settlements—commonly referred to as “slums”—suggests that slum residence constitutes a major health risk for children. In this article, we use data from 191 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across 73 developing countries to investigate this concern empirically. Our results indicate that children in slums have better health outcomes than children living in rural areas yet fare worse than children in better-off neighborhoods of the same urban settlements. A large fraction of the observed health differences appears to be explained by pronounced differences in maternal education, household wealth, and access to health services across residential areas. After we control for these characteristics, children growing up in the slums and better-off neighborhoods of towns show levels of morbidity and mortality that are not statistically different from those of children living in rural areas. Compared with rural children, children living in cities (irrespective of slum or formal residence) fare better with respect to mortality and stunting but not with respect to recent illness episodes.     

The effects of migrant remittances on population–environment dynamics in migrant origin areas: international migration, fertility, and consumption in highland Guatemala

International migration impacts origin regions in many ways. As examples, remittances from distant migrants may alter consumption patterns within sending communities, while exposure to different cultural norms may alter other behaviors. This paper combines these insights to offer a unique lens on migration’s environmental impact. From an environmental perspective, we ask the following question: is the likely rise in consumption brought about by remittances counterbalanced by a reduction in fertility in migrant households following exposure to lower fertility cultures? Based on ethnographic case studies in two western highland Guatemalan communities, we argue that the near-term rise in consumption due to remittances is not counterbalanced by rapid decline in migrant household fertility. However, over time, the environmental cost of consumption may be mitigated at the community level through diffusion of contraception and family planning norms yielding lower family size.     

城市流动人口聚居社区的公共政策与社区服务分析——五城市流动人口聚居社区调查

本文基于五城市流动人口聚居社区的调查资料,采用描述性分析的方法,首先通过对五城市流动人口聚居社区流动人口与社区城市户籍居民的对比分析,考察城市流动人口聚居社区管理与服务的状况;然后在分析的基础上提出对于相关公共政策和社区服务问题的一些思考.     

韩国提高人口素质的主要举措及经验

20世纪60～70年代,人口素质的提高在韩国经济腾飞过程中起到了不可忽视的作用。韩国政府通过实施家庭生育计划,完善教育制度和社会保障制度以及开展"新村运动"等在短期内大幅度提高了国民的人口素质。总结韩国政府的主要举措可以得出如下经验:注重传统儒家文化在幼儿教育中的作用;建立多层次教育体系满足各类市场人才需求;寻求多样化的教育经费投入来源;重视提高农民的受教育水平;建立完善的社会保障制度。     

An evaluation of socially responsive planning in a new resource town

New resource towns on the Canadian frontier have presented planners with opportunities to experiment with innovative planning ideas which attempt to resolve the persistent problems of such communities. In the planning of Tumbler Ridge, a new coal mining town in British Columbia, socially responsive planning was an attempt to develop a town using principles derived from social science research. In this paper the reactions of residents to selected attributes which reflect the application of these principles are examined five years after settlement began. Ratings of community attributes offer an indication of aspects of residential satisfaction, while the results of a principal components analysis suggest the dimensionality of residents' evaluative structures and provide a useful framework within which to consider planning issues. Issues examined are: the association between employment and the community environment; the suitability of the environment for children; and the social environment. While social aspects of the new community are judged as satisfactory, less positive elements reflect the underlying influence of the economic well-being of the mining company on overall community satisfaction. When compared to indicators of community satisfaction in other western Canadian resource towns, ratings for Tumbler Ridge tend to be fairly low. It is concluded that the inability of planners to adequately control implementation or dontinuity of their ideas has resulted in a community not distinctly different from other resource towns. Efforts have been further hampered by a lack of adequate models of the distinctive dynamics of resource communities.     

Global Warming: New Scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to review the state of knowledge about human‐induced climate change and assess possible responses. Most of its activities are conducted by three working groups, concerned respectively with scientific aspects of the climate system, with the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate change, and with options for mitigating that change. The major IPCC reports have been highly detailed statements of scientific consensus on changes in the climate system, issued at roughly five‐year intervals. These reflect the input of some hundreds of scientists, with drafts scrutinized by expert reviewers, revised to attain consensus, and eventually approved (or “accepted”) by the full Panel. The first such assessment, published in 1990, was influential in formulating the Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted at the 1992 Rio conference. The second assessment report (SAR), Climate Change 1995, produced the widely cited estimate that global warming would raise average temperatures by 1°–3.5°C by 2100, with a “best estimate” of 2°C, and produce a sea‐level rise of 0.13 – 0.94 meters. That report took the further step of explicitly linking the warming to anthropogenic (human‐caused) emissions of greenhouse gases. Its cautious conclusion: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis is Working Group I's contribution to the third IPCC assessment. The document was finalized at the Group's meeting in Shanghai in January 2001. A brief (18‐page) “Summary for Policymakers” was also released at this meeting, distilling the findings of the full report and putting them in more accessible language. Two sections of this summary document, presenting the Group's projections of atmospheric temperature trends and sea‐level rises, are reproduced below. The procedure followed was to assemble hypothetical alternative combinations of future greenhouse gas emissions in the form of emission scenarios, which were fed into large‐scale climate models to produce estimates of future temperature and sea‐level trends. For the third assessment report the scenarios used were set out in the IPCC Working Group Ill's Special Report on Emission Scenarios (March 2000), and are referred to below as the “SRES scenarios.” There are 35 of them in all. They fall into six groups, detailed in the text box, from each of which an illustrative case is plotted in the charts. (The shaded areas in the charts are envelopes spanning the 35 scenarios. Some additional details shown in the original charts have been omitted here for clarity.) The SAR scenarios are referred to as IS92. The major difference from the second assessment is in the projected temperature increase, which is now put at 1.4°–5.8°C (or in Fahrenheit degrees, 2.5°–10.4°). The projected sea‐level rise is slightly smaller, at 0.09 – 0.88 meters. There is also a strengthening of the statement on anthropogenic causes, which now reads: “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the [atmospheric] warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” The report notes that even with stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions, there may be continuing climate effects beyond the twenty‐first century. One such effect is the “weakening of ocean thermohaline circulation “—the ocean currents that, for example, transport heat into high northern‐hemisphere latitudes and moderate the coastal climates of those regions. The summary report is available online at the IPCC's website, www.ipcc.ch . The complete third assessment report, covering also the conclusions of Working Groups II and III (particularly on the social and economic costs of forecast climate change), will be released shortly.     

Demographic scenarios by age,sex and education corresponding to the SSP narratives

In this paper, we translate the five narratives as defined by the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) research community into five alternative demographic scenarios using projections by age, sex and level of education for 171 countries up to 2100. The scenarios represent a significant step beyond past population scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change context, which considered only population size. The definitions of the medium assumptions about future fertility, mortality, migration and education trends are taken from a major new projections effort by the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, while the assumptions for all the other scenarios were defined in interactions with other groups in the SSP community. Since a full data base with all country-specific results is available online, this paper can only highlight selected results.     

From Fisheries Decline to Tourism Destination: Mass Media,Tourism Mobility,and the Newfoundland Coastal Environment

Abstract

In this paper, we examine narratives of tourism mobility circulated through print news media coverage of Newfoundland published in Canada, the UK, and the USA between 1992 and 2010. Initially articles were situated within a larger narrative of fisheries collapse, rural decline, and out-migration. In recent years, however, the discourse shifted to emphasize how non-human nature, including whales, icebergs, and national parks, serves as a tourism attractor, yielding benefits for rural communities. We draw on Latour’s work on political ecology, as well as on Urry’s work on tourism, mobility, and climate change, to analyze the eco-political implications of media accounts of tourism and the Newfoundland coastal environment.     

SMPD Scenarios of Spatial Distribution of Human Population in China

Three scenarios of spatial distribution of human population in China are developed in the years 2010 and 2020, respectively by means of the method of surface modeling of population distribution (SMPD). Each one of the SMPD scenarios is defined as a plausible alternative future under particular assumptions of elevation, water system, net primary productivity (NPP), urbanization, transport infrastructure development, and population growth. The SMPD scenarios show that if population could freely migrate within the whole China, the balanced ratios of population in the western region, the middle region and the eastern region to total population in the whole China would be 16%, 33% and 52%, respectively.     

Ordering urban communities according to their socio-economic characteristics

Defining the needs of a community and ranking communities according to their level of distress presents both conceptual and empirical difficulties. In this study, the needs of 51 communities are defined by five selected socio-economic characteristics. The scores of these communities in each of the characteristics were arranged by Partial Order, allowing for a Multi rather than a Uni-Dimensional Scaling. This Multi-Dimensional Scaling maintains that the scores of a given community may be high in one characteristics and low in another. Arranging these communities by Partial Order Scalogram Analysis (POSA) allows the differentiation between communities according to their Level of Distress (The Joint Direction) and the Type of Distress (The Lateral Direction). This analysis can help in forming a policty for intervention by selecting communities or settlements either by the level or by the type of their distress or by relating to both of these measures.