Past Cyberseminars

Summary

Organizers: Wolfgang Lutz, Raya Muttarak and Aayushma KC of the Wittgenstein Centre, Alex de Sherbinin, and Susana Adamo of PERN and CIESIN at Columbia University

This cyberseminar focuses on the Demography of Sustainable Human Wellbeing with the Wittgenstein Centre, which is an alliance of IIASA, Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Vienna). The purpose will be to vet a newly proposed indicator of human wellbeing “Years of Good Life” (counting only years of life above minimum levels of physical and mental health, income, and subjective life satisfaction) which can be calculated for all sub-populations of interest and has been tailor made to serve as criterion variable for assessing sustainable progress in human wellbeing over time in sustainability science. The webinar will also include expert contributions from producers of other wellbeing indices, including the World Happiness Index, the SDG Index, and the Planetary pressures–adjusted Human Development Index.

Summary

Organizers: Jamon Van Den Hoek (Oregon State U.), David Wrathall (Oregon State U.), Susana Adamo (CIESIN, Columbia U.), Alex de Sherbinin (CIESIN, Columbia U.)

Co-sponsors: GEO Human Planet

Since 2015, the global refugee population has risen precipitously, reaching a record 26 million people across 135 countries. Forcibly displaced due to violent conflict and political persecution, refugees seek asylum and security abroad but have often found highly restrictive conditions. Refugee camps are often established in marginal borderlands, and state policies can restrain access to arable land and inhibit decision-making power over livelihoods and employment. Refugees have less agency and resources available for local climate change mitigation or adaptation. Refugee mobility is often confined to within camp boundaries, restrictions that have generally been tightened even further during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Refugees are also broadly excluded from Sustainable Development Goal progress reporting and national census data collection even in major refugee hosting countries, which implicitly discourages sustainable development initiatives for and by refugees. These challenges are hardly short lived. The average stay in a refugee settlement was 10 years as of 2015, and more than two-thirds of refugees experience what the UNHCR calls a “protracted refugee situation” in which refugees remain in limbo for years on end, unable to return home but without provision of basic rights and access to economic and social services in their host country. Added to this are large and growing internally displaced populations (IDMC 2020).

The combination of geographic and social marginalization, protracted confinement, and an overarching absence of refugee populations in nationally representative data heightens the potential for local environmental degradation and long-term climate vulnerability for generations to come. Perhaps because of the focus on addressing immediate humanitarian needs of refugees, there has been far less attention toward understanding long-term refugee relationships with their environment and climate hazards. This cyberseminar will focus on new perspectives and innovative methodological approaches from geography, remote sensing, economics, disaster studies, and development studies that shed light on the environmental and climatic challenges faced by refugees, as well as impacts of camps on the local environment, and will offer potential solutions for addressing these challenges. With scholars and practitioners from around the world and considering a range of case studies, we will examine the interplay between refugees, the local environment, and climate change against the broader social and political contexts that frame these relationships. Field-tested approaches and analyses will commingle with nation-wide Big Data studies to offer a diversity of perspectives across geographic scales and regions. As such, this cyberseminar will provide a platform for dynamic engagement between different communities to advance our collective understanding and shared perspectives on refugee population-environment relationships in a changing climate.

Summary

Population dynamics are at the center of the climate change-population-food security nexus.  On the one hand, not only does population growth contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, it also drives demand for food. Likewise, rising incomes come with changing diets toward animal-based products, which are typically more resource-intensive and display higher environmental impacts. Population size and composition thus influence both climate change and food security. On the other hand, the impacts of climate change on human wellbeing and livelihoods are already being felt. Climate change may affect food security directly by reducing crop yields and available farming land and through adverse impacts on livestock health.  Indirect effects of climate change on food security may be observed through reductions in agriculture income, conflict, or impacts on global “breadbaskets” that result in increasing (or volatile) international, national and local food prices. The level of vulnerability and ability to respond and adapt to climate change and subsequent food insecurity varies and reflects individual farmer and community factors as well as broader scale economic, governmental and policy responses. Population dynamics and characteristics thus matters both in terms of population impacts on climate change and food security and in terms of determining who is vulnerable.

Despite the central role demography plays in climate change and food security research, the topics remain understudied among demographers.  The understanding of current and future population size, composition and spatial distribution as well as differentials in dietary patterns, vulnerability and adaptive capacity will help policy planning for future climate change.  This cyberseminar will focus on the applications of methodological tools and concepts in demography, geography, economics, systems analysis, and other related fields in analyzing the population-climate change-food security nexus. We will explore empirical work and future scenarios that consider the impact of population on climate and food systems and the impact of climate and weather factors and food security on population subgroups and communities. The cyberseminar provides a platform for dynamic engagement between scientists from different disciplinary communities to advance the conversation centered on the nexus of population-climate change-food security.

Cyberseminar co-sponsors:

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an independent, international research institute with National Member Organizations in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Through its research programs and initiatives, the institute conducts policy-oriented research into issues that are too large or complex to be solved by a single country or academic discipline.

CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), which brings together some of the world’s best researchers in agricultural science, development research, climate science and Earth system science, to identify and address the most important interactions, synergies and tradeoffs between climate change, agriculture and food security.

Organizers:

Raya Muttarak (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)), Kathryn Grace (University of Minnesota), Bryan Jones (CUNY Baruch), Susana Adamo (CIESIN, Columbia University), Alex de Sherbinin (CIESIN, Columbia University), Andres Ignacio (Environmental Science for Social Change), Leiwen Jiang (Population Council and Asian Population Research Center), and César Augusto Marques (Escola Nacional de Ciências Estatísticas - ENCE)

Summary

Research in the field of population and environment increasingly requires high resolution geospatial data. In contrast to other types of population and settlement data based on administrative unit boundaries, gridded data sets provide consistent and comparable units of analysis. These data sets can be produced at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, paving the way for relevant research questions both about the impacts of human activities on the environment and, in turn, environmental impacts on human health, well-being and livelihoods. Such data are also important for monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Population-environment research on land system dynamics relies on data products that provide spatio-temporal information about land cover, land use activities, human population distributions and movements. With the increasing availability of finer-scale data products and higher power computational tools, researchers have a wide variety of data and methodological options from which to integrate people and pixel data. Of specific interest to this cyberseminar are the gridded, raster-based products that represent settlement patterns, population density and socio-demographic characteristics have rapidly advanced and proliferated in recent decades. There are a wide variety of gridded population and settlement datasets for end-users to choose from, with varying temporal and spatial specificities combined with underlying methods informing the relevant application and use of subsequent population data sets for further studies.

This cyberseminar will focus on the fitness-for-use aspect of various gridded population and settlement products and their suitability for different application areas in population-environment studies. We will explore issues of uncertainty, endogeneity, temporal-explicitness, and spatial conformity in these data products along with scale and projection considerations. The seminar also provides examples of applications of gridded population and settlement products in population-environment research. The cyberseminar provides a platform for dynamic engagement between producer and end-user research communities to push forward the conversation on understanding the continued method development and advancement for integrating these products into the nexus of population-environment-climate studies.

This PERN cyberseminar is being co-organized with the POPGRID Data Collaborative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Summary

Moderators: Members of the IUSSP Special Emphasis Panel on Climate, Migration & Health

• Lori Hunter, University of Colorado Boulder
• Philippe Bocquier, Université Catholique de Louvain
• Sabine Henry, Université de Namur
• Celia McMichael, University of Melbourne

Sponsors: IUSSP, CU Population Center (University of Colorado Boulder)

The demographic research community has made impressive progress over the past two decades in understanding the environmental dimensions of migration. Similar progress has also been made on understanding migration’s health dimensions – both as related to health selectivity and health consequences. These understandings intersect to generate an intriguing three-way connection – one which has yet to receive substantial scholarly attention. This cyber-seminar focuses on this underexplored terrain of connections between climate, migration and health.

In this cyber-seminar, we will review the existing understandings of climate-migration health but, even more importantly, discuss essential future directions. We explore what can be learned through bringing together research on the pairwise associations of climate-migration and migration-health, while highlighting critical knowledge gaps. Important topics also include theoretical, data and methodological constraints and opportunities.

Cyberseminar outcomes

There are two articles published based on this cyberseminar:

• Kugler, T.A., Grace, K., Wrathall, D.J. et al. 2019. People and Pixels 20 years later: the current data landscape and research trends blending population and environmental data. Population and Environment 41(2): 209-234. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-019-00326-5
• Tellman, B., Magliocca, N.R., Turner, B.L. et al. 2020. Understanding the role of illicit transactions in land-change dynamics . Nature Sustainability. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0457-1

Summary

Moderator: David J. Wrathall (Oregon State University)

Twenty years ago the National Research Council published the ground-breaking People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science (NRC, 1998). The volume focused on emerging research findings that linked population dynamics and human activities to changes in land use and land cover, revealing the many ways that human activities affect landscapes from the Latin America to Southeast Asia. Separate chapters also addressed health- and famine-related applications of remote sensing. Since that time, new research opportunities are opening because of the increasing array of social science data from both traditional (e.g. censuses, surveys) and new sources (e.g., mobile phone and social media data), the growing variety of
satellite and aerial data sources (e.g., high resolution, VIIRS nightlights, radar, UAVs), and the access to computation cyberinfrastructure for the analysis of massive spatiotemporal datasets.

This cyberseminar aims to identify and review the primary research breakthroughs and future directions opened by this digital revolution. The “people and pixels” move in geography shed light on the concerns of sustainability, human livelihoods, land use planning, resource use, and conservation, and led to practical innovations in agricultural planning, hazard impact analysis, and drought monitoring. What will the next 20 years bring?

Key future directions for human-environment interactions that build on original People and Pixels research priorities include:

1. Integration of RS and survey data: combining spatially expansive satellite imagery with nationally or regionally representative household surveys, and with censuses;
2. Integration of RS and big data: use of data from portable digital devices to achieve new research objectives, such as population downscaling, and “poverty mapping.”
3. Breakthroughs in RS-based product development: global analysis of co-located landscape processes over long periods of time using recently developed satellite-derived data products (e.g. global human settlements, forest change, and surface water data sets).
4. Computational advances: advances in computation and GUI platforms for implementing machine learning, deep learning, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, large-scale unsupervised mapping/clustering, etc.
5. Remote sensing as validation technique: confirming high impact hypotheses around disaster impacts, land grabbing, violent conflict, famine, and illicit economies through their interaction with landscapes.

In this Cyberseminar, we will assess where we’ve come since 1998, identify key extensions of the People and Pixels foundation, and their significance for the demographic aspects of local to global sustainability problems: disasters, famine, drought, war, poverty, climate change, and migration.

Cyberseminar outcomes

An article based on this cyberseminar appears in Journal of Religion and Demography. The full citation is:

Skirbekk, V., de Sherbinin, A., Adamo, S. B., Navarro, J., & Chai-Onn, T. (2020). Religious Affiliation and Environmental Challenges in the 21st Century , Journal of Religion and Demography, 7(2), 238-271. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/2589742X-12347110

Summary

This Population-Environment Research Network (PERN) cyberseminar focuses on culture, belief systems, values, and the environment. The world is facing dramatic demographic shifts, and these are associated with different cultural values and belief systems that have implications for the environment. Industrialized countries face rapid aging while developing countries have large children and youth populations. These different patterns, and the cultural values and beliefs associated with them, have implications for population dynamics and how societies relate to the environment and how they are impacted by environmental changes and hazards. This relatively little studied area of the population-environment nexus is ripe for new discoveries.

Culture, belief systems and values are central to environmental decision making and behavior and to how people perceive and respond to risks and crises. Census, survey, focus group and other demographic data collection methods are central to understanding belief systems as they relate to the demographic makeup of society, including racial and ethnic groups, age and sex distribution, education attainment, and geographic factors. The cyberseminar will address a number of topics, including:

1. cultural attitudes and values as they relate to perceptions of the environment;
2. culture, belief systems, values and environmentally significant consumption patterns;
3. religious beliefs and their implications for age structure and population growth;
4. how religious and other beliefs vary by population composition;
5. vulnerability and perceptions of risk as they relate to different demographic groups.

This cyberseminar is co-organized with the Columbia Aging Center.

Cyberseminar outcomes

An article based on this cyberseminar appears in the journal Science of The Total Environment. The full citation is:

Dos Santos, S., E. A. Adams, G. Neville, Y. Wada, A. de Sherbinin, E. Mullin Bernhardt and S. B. Adamo. 2017. Urban growth and water access in sub-Saharan Africa: Progress, challenges, and emerging research directions . Science of The Total Environment 607–608:497-508

Summary

Historically population dynamics have been fundamentally shaped by access to water resources (de Sherbinin & Dompka 1998; Kummu et al. 2011). Early towns and cities invariably were located near reliable water sources, and population density has historically been highest in humid and sub-humid climate zones (Samson et al. 2011). As civilization progressed, greater efforts were made to create water transport systems (e.g., the aqueducts of ancient Rome) for provisioning of major settlements. While new sources of water have been developed (pumping deep aquifers and desalination), and agriculture and industry have become more efficient, society’s fundamental dependence on water resources has not changed. Recent droughts affecting São Paulo, Brazil, and major urban areas in California highlight the fragility of major cities to drought, and
researchers project further water-related shortages for urban areas in the future (McDonald et al. 2011).

Water scarcity has been identified as the number 1 risk in terms of impacts in the Global Risk Report – ahead of items such as spread of infectious diseases, weapons of mass destruction, and interstate conflict – while the second risk in terms of likelihood is extreme weather events, including flood and drought (WEF 2015). Absolute water scarcity is not the only issue; in some regions, such as China and India, major rivers and lakes have become too polluted to use (UN 2015), and there are also issues related to differential access to water resources. Access to adequate improved waters supplies in informal settlements in many developing countries is particularly challenging, and this has important health and gender dimensions. At the same
time, drought has led to temporary and permanent displacement of agriculturalists and pastoralists in many developed and developing regions, further contributing to urban growth (see for example McLeman et al. 2014 and Guilmoto 1998).

Existing and projected water crises in the future pose threats not only to human wellbeing and environmental sustainability for the planet, but increasingly are perceived by governments as threats to national security (Bakker and Morinville 2013). Growing attention is being paid to the role of governance in mediating human responses to the complexity and uncertainty of future water supply. Yet water governance remains ambiguous in many aspects. This ambiguity is a challenge for researchers and practitioners as it inhibits effective communication and sets participants at cross-purposes.

This cyberseminar focuses on water supplies and population dynamics. Major questions include:

• What are some of the intervening/mediating/contextual factors linking water supply/access and population dynamics, globally and locally?
• Where are some current 'hotspots' of water scarcity, and what are the population dynamics in these hotspots?
• What are some of the current ‘hotspots’ of flooding and drought, and what are the population dynamics in those hotspots?
• Are supply systems for major cities and agricultural areas in most regions adequate to supply domestic, industrial, and agricultural (DIA) needs?
• How can water supply and sanitation systems be bolstered, especially in informal settlements of developing country cities, and issues such as the gender dimension of water access be best addressed?
• What strategies can be deployed for increasing wastewater treatment covering greater proportions of the world’s urban population?
• How might population distribution change in the future as a result of declines or increases in water availability owing to climate change?
• What could be the consequences of these changes?
• What existing/emerging efforts to create governance institutions and strategies for a more sustainable future of water supply may deserve a discussion?

This cyberseminar contributes to the UN International Decade for Action “Water for Life” (2005-2015) and to discussions around a plan of action for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

References

Bakker, K. and C. Morinville. 2013. The Governance Dimensions of Water Security: A review. Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science. 371 (2002), 2013011

de Sherbinin, A., and V. Dompka (eds.). 1998. Water and Population Dynamics: Case Studies and Policy Implications.
Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Guilmoto, C. 1998. Institutions and Migrations. Short-term Versus Long-term Moves in Rural West Africa. Population Studies,
Volume 52, Issue 1.

Kummu, M., H. de Moel, P.J. Ward, and O. Varis. 2011. How Close Do We Live to Water? A Global Analysis of Population
Distance to Freshwater Bodies. PLOSOne. Published: June 8, 2011DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020578

McDonald, R.I., P. Green, D. Balk, B.M Fekete, C. Revenga, et al. 2011. Urban growth, climate change, and freshwater
availaibilty. PNAS. doi:/10.1073/pnas.1011615108.

McLeman, R., J. Dupre, L.B. Ford, J. Ford, K. Gajewski, and G. Marchildo. 2014. What we learned from the Dust Bowl:
lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment, 35(4): 417–440.2014.

Samson, J., D. Berteaux, B.J. McGill and M.M. Humphries. 2011. Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted
impacts of climate change on human populations. Global Ecology and Biogeography doi:10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00632.x

United Nations. 2015. Water for Life: Water Quality. Available at http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/quality.shtml

World Economic Forum (WEF). 2014. Global Risks Report 2015. Geneva: WEF

Summary

This cyberseminar is co-hosted by PERN and the United Nations University-Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn, Germany, and will be moderated by Dr. David Wrathall of UNU-EHS. In November 2013, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties 19 in Warsaw, institutional arrangements for an international mechanism to address “loss and damage” will be part of negotiations. But what is “loss and damage”? How does it relate to climate change mitigation and adaptation? How will it affect the populations that are most vulnerable to climate change impacts? Between 28 October and 1 November 2013, before the policy debates, this cyberseminar will take up this timely topic to clarify the different meanings of “loss and damage” and their possible implications for both research and policy.

Over the last decade, the manifestation of climate change impacts and advances in our scientific understanding of them have given life to parallel policy and research discourses around “loss and damage” that communities are experiencing in association with extreme weather and slow onset events linked to climate change. These include changing rainfall patterns, droughts, dry spells, weather extremes, sea level rise, increasing temperatures, ocean acidification, glacial retreat and related impacts, salinization, land and forest degradation, loss of biodiversity and desertification (UNFCCC 2011, p. 6). Conceptually, the “loss and damage” debate is linked closely to recent research on the limits and constraints of climate change daptation,
and patterns of migration, displacement and human mobility linked to climate change impacts. Clear instances are coming to the fore in which climate-driven stresses cannot be adapted to, not because of internal deficiencies of vulnerable peoples, but because of the overwhelming nature of the stress. Specific types, magnitudes and rates of exposure may have rapid and dramatic impacts on places, such as Small Island Developing States (SIDS), coastal settlements and semi-arid regions. In some of these areas, productive livelihoods and even continued human habitation are reaching their limits. The abandonment
of livelihoods and homelands are the clearest examples of loss and damage associated with adverse effects of climate change.

Loss and damage is adversity that people experience, but it also represents a newly forming international policy regime. When United Nations member states recognized the phenomenon of climate change, a policy framework was proposed, the UNFCCC, to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases. However, in the course of negotiations, states saw that mitigation efforts would not be sufficient to avoid rising global temperatures, and another policy paradigm came into being with the Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF) to adapt to expected impacts. With the grave apprehension that adaptation will not prevent adverse impacts from occurring, a policy framework for preparing for the inevitable losses and damages was included in CAF in 2010. Thus, with the introduction of language on loss and damage, a new climate policy regime has been born with the aim of preventing loss and damage, and assisting the most adversely affected. This will be a point for discussion at COP19 in Warsaw in November 2013.

At this opportune moment, the PERN cyberseminar will focus on current academic debates and emerging policy discussions around loss and damage. On the first day, we will introduce conceptual issues: what is L&D, how is it attributed to climate change, and how does it relate to climate change adaptation? On day two, we will address the methodological challenges for research and policy, including assessing L&D, valuating and comparing L&D within populations and across regions, and identifying non-economic L&D. On day three, we will situate the discussion with empirical evidence from the field. The fourth day will address the legal and institutional possibilities for loss and damage policy, the legal construct, and potential mechanisms for addressing L&D. And on the final day, we will discuss what is coming at COP19 in November, and future steps for a research agenda. We are looking forward to your participation.

Summary

PERN is planning to hold a cyberseminar on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) on 7-14 October 2013, with the purpose of stimulating the discussion on this new methodology. Leiwen Jiang of NCAR's Integrated Assessment team in the Climate Change Research Group has kindly accepted to co-moderate this seminar with Susana Adamo of PERN.

In the context of the new integrated scenarios of climate change of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and beyond, the SSPs represent a new generation of socio-economic scenarios able to overcome the mitigation/adaptation divide in research by serving the needs of both communities by combining broad narratives and a limited set of quantitative projections. Five initial narratives (sustainability, middle of the road, fragmentation, inequality, and conventional development), somewhat analogous to and extending the old IPCC SRES scenarios , are used to define a matrix that represents essential and stylized socioeconomic conditions along two axes, “challenges to mitigation” and “challenges to adaptation”, sorted from low to high.

As in the SRES approach, population is considered as one of the determinants, but now the demographic dimension also includes education attainment and urban/rural distribution, in addition to other socio-economic conditions, and the possibility of addressing the different temporal (shorter or near-term, longer or long-term) and spatial (global, regional, local) scales. Some of the questions to be discussed are:

• Architecture: what are the essential differences between the SRES and the SSPs?
• Scale: How do the SSPs contribute to link and integrate research at the global, regional and local scales?
• Dimensions: What other variables could be realistically added to the SSPs, and what are the data needs?
• Consistency: How do the assumed changes in the demographic and other socioeconomic variables reflect historical experiences of the interactions between them?
• Relevance: How could the population-environment research community make use of, and contribute to, the new SSPs?

Summary

This Population-Environment Research Network (PERN) Cyberseminar brings together two allied efforts to bring population considerations into the debate at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio in June (Rio+20).

In the one, a global forum of experts met under UNFPA sponsorship in late November at IIASA in Austria to bring data and research to bear on these higher-level population relationships. Under the broader umbrella of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, their summary document, the Laxenburg Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development, was announced in a 24 February 2012 letter in Science magazine.

In the other, The Royal Society's expert international working group, chaired by Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston FRS, oversaw a study which resulted in a major report, People and the Planet, which will be released on 26 April 2012. They conducted a wide-ranging evidence gathering exercise involving meetings with government, industry, academia, and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations in the UK and overseas, as well as an open public call for evidence.

In this cyberseminar we will draw on both documents. It takes as a premise that population matters are important in considerations of sustainable development (SD). Yet, the framing of the discussion has tended to be Malthusian, with a focus on population size and growth rates and a policy emphasis on efforts to curb population growth rates.

The size of populations, though, is only one dimension of their characteristics that matter for SD prospects. Research indicates that size is usually not even the most important dimension. Other dimensions—among them age distribution, household composition, place of residence, migratory and consumption patterns, gender considerations, and educational structure—have arguably more important and more predictable implications for people’s ability and willingness to engage in mitigation of environmental challenges, their effectiveness in adapting to such challenges, and their success in developing and adopting new approaches and technologies across the spectrum of daily life.

Through this cyberseminar, researchers and policymakers from around the world can add their perspectives—their readings of the scientific evidence and its policy implications—to those of their colleagues who met at IIASA and who contributed to People and the Planet report. Some of the IIASA and The Royal Society study experts will be back as active participants during the seminar week.

Summary

This cybeseminar will address population displacement and the potential need for organized resettlement owing to climate change and associated mitigation and adaptation projects. The seminar will address two major types of future resettlement – 1) resettlement stemming from direct climate impacts, and 2) resettlement owing to large scale mitigation and adaptation (M&A) projects that are meant to reduce climate change risks. The latter include large-scale projects such as dams, coastal defenses, water transfer schemes, biofuel plantations and renewable energy complexes which, regardless of their actual effectiveness in promoting M&A, are often justified for climate reasons.

This discussion starts from two premises. The first is that resettlement should not be a preferred option, but that ignoring it altogether means that necessary planning and capacity building that could improve outcomes for resettled communities will probably not take place. The seminar will nevertheless explore other adaptive responses in regions where climate change impacts are particularly severe – ranging from investments in in situ adaptation, spontaneous migration, to assisted relocation. The second is that there is much to be learned from past development forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) and disaster related resettlement that could be applicable to future climate-related resettlement, and therefore the research community has an important role to play. The seminar is based in part on discussions that took place at a November 2010 Bellagio Conference on the same topic (see http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/confluence/display/CCDR).

Major questions to be addressed include:

1. Under what circumstances could displacement and resettlement due to direct climate impacts be necessary?
2. Which countries or regions (or types of regions) are most likely to require resettlement?
3. What are the range of policy tools at the disposal of governments – from in situ adaptation to facilitated migration and assisted relocation to resettlement – and what are the costs and benefits of each?
4. How does the “immobility paradox” (the fact that most people do not migrate even when it would be economically rational to do so) inform the debate around resettlement?
5. What lessons have been learned from experience in government led development forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) that are relevant to future climate-related resettlement?
6. What is new about potential future climate-related resettlement that may require adjustments to past lessons?
7. In terms of resettlement praxis, what protection mechanisms can be put into place to ensure that those who are resettled or voluntarily move because of M&A projects or climate impacts are not worse off after their moves? And what are current policy frameworks, “best practices”, regulations and legal mechanisms in the area of displacement and resettlement?
8. What are the available methods (and need for novel ones) for estimating social and environmental impacts of such projects in both intervention and resettlement areas (e.g., participatory assessment, surveys)?
9. What changes might be needed in order to adapt impact assessments to the context of future climate change related displacement and resettlement?
10. The study of displacement and resettlement has been fragmented among different agencies (e.g. refugee agencies, disaster response agencies, and development agencies) and corresponding research communities. Given the likelihood displacements will increase with climate change, how do we foster truly interdisciplinary research that borrows from all branches?

Summary

The goal of this cyberseminar is to identify the past use of remote sensing data products in population-environment research, to explore challenges of remote sensing data integration, and to begin to think about the specifications of future remote sensing data products that would meet the needs of the research community. An ancillary goal is thinking about how to organize a process whereby greater social science input is provided for the design of future satellite sensors. The cyberseminar is co-sponsored by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), which supports the PERN Web site, and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). SEDAC has been tasked by NASA and its User Working Group to think specifically about how to increase the input of social scientists in designing future missions, and GEO has expressed a similar interest in engaging the social sciences as it builds a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) to address nine societal benefit areas. It is recognized that the nature of the challenges to global sustainability are fundamentally interdisciplinary, but that social scientists have often not had a place at the table when discussing data needs for Earth systems science in the broadest sense, which comprises coupled human-environment systems.

Major questions that this cyberseminar will address include:

1. What are the branches of population-environment research that use remote sensing data?
2. Which sensors/instruments are most often used in P-E research?
3. What are the barriers to greater use?
4. How do indicators constructed from remotely sensed data compare with those collected through field research or in surveys?
5. What data integration issues are faced in combining data from different sources and resolutions?
6. What are the prerequisites for inter- and transdisciplinary research in terms of standards of data interpretation, access to data from different sources, and the social and political purposes for which the data are used?
7. What are the societal benefits from the fundamental or applied research (using remote sensing data) engaged in by the P-E research community?
8. Are there common data needs that can be articulated by our community?
9. What are the major programmed missions such as NASA’s Decadal Missions (from the US National Research Council’s Decadal Survey) or those of the European Space Agency, China, Brazil, India, or commercial providers, that may meet important data gaps?
10. Recognizing that past research may have been constrained by the capabilities of existing sensors, what capabilities might be desired by this community for future missions (which hopefully are also technically feasible to build and launch)?
11. Is there a way to build a broad consensus across the social science community for the remote sensing data that is most needed by this community? What kind of process would be required?

As in the past, PERN will engage several experts to write brief contributions touching on these different themes. But the cyberseminar will be conducted in the spirit of a “brainstorming session”, in which there is freedom to think “out of the box” and express ideas for new sensors and how they might be applied to specific research questions.

In line with the above questions, the structure of the seminar will have three parts: The first part of the seminar will focus on what sensors researchers have used in the past to answer different P-E related questions and how data integration challenges were met. The second part will would look towards future programmed missions and examine how those future missions might be used to address P-E research questions. And the third part will consider “ideal” future missions for answering P-E research questions. Examples include the proposed 50m “NightSat” mission that, if launched, would provide much higher resolution night-time lights imagery than the current DMSP-OLS sensor.

Cyberseminar outcomes

An article based on this cyberseminar appears in the journal Population & Environment. The full citation is:

Hummel, D., S. Adamo, A. de Sherbinin, L. Murphy, L. Aggarwal, L. Zulu, J. Liu, K. Knight. 2012. Inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to population-environment research for sustainability aims: A review and appraisal. Population & Environment. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11111-012-0176-2.

Summary

The Population-Environment Research Network (PERN) and the Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE) will carry out an online seminar to examine the theoretical and methodological aspects of research into the population-environment nexus.

The starting point in this seminar is an interdisciplinary, social-ecological perspective on population dynamics which allows structuring the nexus of population, environment and society in theoretically and methodologically novel ways. It focuses on the interactions among demographic changes and supply systems such as water, food, and energy. In this perspective, interactions are reconstructed in the context of social-ecological systems dynamics. The approach seeks to be applicable to different population dynamics (e.g. migration, population growth and decline, urbanization, household structures), as well as to different socio-economic and cultural contexts.

Through the cyberseminar the applicability of the social-ecological approach shall be discussed by framing it to other interdisciplinary approaches such as sustainable livelihoods, carrying capacity, IPAT, ecological footprint, and political ecology. Issues to be addressed in this seminar include: 1) State of the art on conceptual frameworks; 2) Methodological issues related to theory (scale, integrated analysis, normativity, inter and trandisciplinarity); and 3) Combinations of different approaches.

Cyberseminar outcomes

PERN co-Coordinator Susana Adamo presented the results of this cyberseminar at the Environment, Forced Migration and Social Vulnerability International Conference (EFMSV) from 9-11 October 2008 in Bonn, Germany (click here for PDF). The conference was organized by the Institute for Environment and Human Security of the United Nations University (UNU-EHS), in partnership with the International Organization for Migrations (IOM), the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the Munich Re Foundation (MRF), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Summary

Issues related to environmentally driven migration are at the core of the population-environment studies agenda. It is an interdisciplinary topic of interest for researchers in different fields and for policy makers, which has commanded only more attention because of the potential impacts of climate change. The identification of environmentally displaced people as migrants or refugees has become one of the major discussions in the migration and environment literature because of its potential political and policy implications. Still, there is no wide agreement on what constitutes an environmentally induced displacement, nor are there statistics available to assess the magnitude of the flows.

The overall purpose of the seminar will be to determine if there is consensus on the definitional issues as well as on the magnitude of flows, and what the evidence shows from regional studies regarding the relative weight of environmental versus other factors in displacing populations. It will examine the evidence for significant population displacements from areas deemed to be environmentally degraded or excessively hazard-prone. It will also review evidence for migration out of metropolitan areas or industrial zones owing to air pollution or health concerns. We will in particular focus on the type and demographic features of these migratory streams: family or individual moves, age and sex profile of migrants, social and economic characteristics, probability of return, and length of stay at the destination. The cyberseminar will also consider potential future population displacements as a result of climate change, in particular changes in rainfall patterns and sea-level rise, which some have claimed will dwarf all contemporary population movements.

Additional topics that will be raised during this seminar include:

• Different environmental events and different types of flows. Both non-forced migration flows and refugee-like situations have been linked to environmental migration. Intensity of the environmental hazard, its duration, the intensity of the response, and its timing are interrelated. The distinction between slow onset (e.g. drought, famine) events and rapid onset (e.g., flooding) events is particularly relevant because the implications for population displacements are very different.

• Attribution of displacement to environmental factors: one of the main issues in considering environmentally displaced populations is that environmental processes cannot be easily isolated from the social, economic and political processes in which they are embedded. The distinction between environmentally and economically induced migrations from areas in which the natural resource base has been gradually eroded over many years by slow degradation processes (land erosion, deforestation, desertification etc.) may need to be better defined, the question being how far economic migrations from rural areas can be construed as strictly economic.

• Household decision-making processes or community-level predisposing factors that lead to the decision to leave an area, and how such movements affect the sending areas.

• The differing characteristics of population displacements in high and low income countries. Are the relocations from hazard-prone areas, such as from the hillsides of Honduras after Hurricane Mitch and the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, qualitatively different?

• The data requirements for better understanding at-risk populations. There has been recent attention to the need for greater data development and improved methods for assessing vulnerable populations. Could better population data in advance of environmental events reduce the magnitude of population displacements?

This cyberseminar is organized by PERN in collaboration with the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Partial support for this cyberseminar was provided by the ECSP.

Summary

English: The purpose of this cyberseminar is to examine the linkages among population, development and environmental processes in rural agrarian communities of the Sudano-Sahelian zone in West Africa. Droughts in the early 1970s and 1980s prompted many to proclaim this region as a Malthusian crisis in the making. Twenty years later, have these gloomy prognoses been borne out, or have agricultural systems coped and adapted to growing population numbers? Or is the picture more complex? This seminar will address these questions (and others themes listed below) through a focus on the results of recent research sponsored by the Programme for International Research on the Interactions between Population, Development and Environment (PRIPODE) of the French Foreign Ministry and the Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography (CICRED).

The studies were conducted over the past three years in the cotton zone of Mali, Southwest and Southeast Burkina Faso, northern Togo, and the Tillaberi and Maradi Districts of Niger (see map and summaries below). These studies provide up-to-date insights to PDE dynamics in this drought-prone and ecologically fragile region where population growth rates remain between 2-3% per annum. Each of the papers focuses on similar dryland farming systems using comparative within-country study sites with differing environmental and population dynamics. Three of the studies (Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo) address recently opened agricultural frontiers owing to Tsetse fly and Onchosoriasis eradication, with resulting migration influxes.

The seminar will be bi-lingual, French and English. Five-page synopses of the research in each country, together with the full papers, will be available as background materials. The research teams will participate fully, and the cyberseminar will also include several invited experts.

Francais: Le but de ce cyber-séminaire est d'examiner les relations entre population, développement et processus environnementaux dans les communautés agraires rurales de la zone soudano-sahélienne d’Afrique occidentale. Les sécheresses du début des années 1970 et des années 1980 ont incité de nombreux observateurs à proclamer que cette région était sur le chemin d’une crise malthusienne. Vingt ans plus tard, peut-on dire que ces sombres pronostics se sont confirmés, ou les systèmes agricoles ont-ils au contraire fait face en s’adaptant à la croissance démographique? Ou l'image est-elle plus complexe? Cette conférence examinera ces questions à partir des résultats du programme de recherche les interactions entre population, développement et environnement (PRIPODE) financé du Ministère français des Affaires étrangères et piloté par le CICRED.

Des études ont été entreprises au cours des trois dernières années cotonnière du Mali, dans sud-ouest et sud-est du Burkina Faso, dans le nord du Togo et dans les zones de Tillaberi et de Maradi au Niger (voir la carte et les sommaires suivantes). Ces études fournissent des aperçus récents sur la dynamique entre population, développement et environnement dans cette région encline à la sécheresse et écologiquement fragile et où la croissance démographique demeure à 2-3% par an. Chacun de ces papiers se concentre sur des systèmes agro-pastoraux de zone aride similaires et utilise à titre comparatif différents sites à l’intérieur de chaque pays. Trois des études (Mali, Burkina Faso et Togo) concernent des régions de frontière agricoles récemment libérées de la mouche Tsé-tsé et de l’onchocercose et affectées par la migration.

Ce cyber-séminaire est une conférence virtuelle qui se tiendra par email du 3 au 14 septembre. L’ensemble des contributions et des discussions sera automatiquement transmis à l’ensemble des inscrits. La conférence sera bilingue, en français et anglais.

Cyberseminar outcomes

An article based on this cyberseminar appears in the journal Global Environmental Change. The full citation is:

de Sherbinin, A., L. VanWey, K. McSweeney, R. Aggarwal, A. Barbieri, S. Henry, L. Hunter, W. Twine, and R. Walker. 2007. “Household Demographics, Livelihoods and the Environment.” Global Environmental Change, Vol. 18, pp. 38-53. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.05.005.

Summary

One of the major areas of population-environment research in the past decade has focused on household-level population dynamics and their relationship, through livelihood strategies, to environmental change. Studies have investigated the relationship between population variables such as household size, age and sex composition, fertility, on-farm population density, migration, and a range of other household-level socio-economic variables, on the one hand, and biophysical variables such as forest cover, coastal mangroves, soil quality, and firewood and water use, on the other. The research has been conducted in the Amazon Basin, Central America, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Africa, and even the United States. The research teams involved in these efforts have spanned the social and environmental sciences and have employed a wide range of methodologies, such as household surveys, participant observation, ground-level analyses of biophysical variables, and integration of remotely sensed imagery.

The cyber-seminar on rural household micro-demographics, livelihoods and the environment provided a forum for scholars from around the globe and from a wide range of disciplines to discuss recent research examining the reciprocal relationships among household-level population dynamics, rural livelihoods and the environment. This area of research is of particular concern to policy makers working in developing countries where large sectors of the population live in rural areas. Thus, the seminar will both directly engage policy makers, and seek to develop conclusions that are relevant to policy audiences.

The seminar’s objectives were to identify common findings from these studies, and to discuss methodological issues. It sought to answer questions such as, Which household-level variables have proven to be most significant in terms of determining different kinds of environmental changes? What are the most important mediating variables? Which methodologies appear to be most promising? What have we learned from longitudinal studies in the Amazon and Thailand? What scales of analysis are most promising?

PERN gratefully acknowledges that funding for this seminar was provided by the International Social Science Council (ISSC/UNESCO) and IUSSP.

Summary

In September 2000, 189 nations committed themselves to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want. This was crystallized in the United Nations Millennium Declaration and a set of eight goals and eighteen targets (the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs) comprising an unprecedented global development agenda. Since the year 2000 significant efforts have been made to identify strategies for attaining the MDGs (through the UN Millennium Project) and to harness bilateral and multilateral development assistance towards achievement of these goals. Although there are no MDGs explicitly addressing population dynamics, there are multiple goals that reinforce elements of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD, Cairo, 1994) Programme of Action, including those related to universal primary education, gender equality, reducing child mortality, and improving maternal health. Furthermore in its reports the Millennium Project made a strong call for addressed population dynamics and sexual and reproductive health in strategies for achieving the MDGs. Finally, a November 2004 UN Population Division Seminar on the Relevance of Population Aspects for the Achievement of the MDGs focused on the “demographic dimension,” though the background papers did not specifically address Goal 7.

Given the importance of the MDGs to the population-development-environment agenda, and the political significance of the high level plenary at the UN in mid-September (the “Millennium +5 Summit”), PERN deemed it important to offer an opportunity for its members to debate the population-environment dimension of these development goals and to contribute to the body of evidence on environmentally sustainable strategies for lifting people out of poverty. The purpose of this cyberseminar was to examine the reciprocal relationship between population dynamics (i.e., population size, growth, density, geographic distribution, age and sex composition, migration, morbidity and mortality) and Goal 7 of the MDGs, which is to “ensure environmental sustainability.” This goal includes the following targets and indicators:

Target 9. Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources.
Indicators: (1) Change in land area covered by forest; (2) Land area protected to maintain biodiversity; (3) GDP per unit of energy use; (4) CO2 emissions per capita.

Target 10. Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
Indicator: Proportion of the population with sustainable access to an improved water source.

Target 11. Have achieved, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
Indicators: (1) Proportion of population with access to improved sanitation; (2) Proportion of population with access to secure land tenure.

Cyberseminar outcomes

An article based on this cyberseminar appears in the journal Population & Environment. The full citation is:

Redman, Charles L. and Nancy S. Jones. 2005. The Environmental, Social, and Health Dimensions of Urban Expansion. Population & Environment. Volume 26, Number 6, pp. 505-520. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11111-005-0010-1.

Summary

Currently urban areas make up a relatively small proportion of all land cover types - two percent by one estimate. Yet, urban land areas are expanding, often rapidly, as higher density development at the core gives way to low-density development at the fringes. Because rates of urban population growth are higher than overall population growth in most countries, and urban areas are the locus of economic activity and transportation nodes, it is likely that the 21st century will see a dramatic increase in urban land cover as a proportion of all land cover types. Throughout the world, urbanized areas are expanding into surrounding areas which are under agricultural or various "natural" land covers such as forests, wetlands or grasslands. These changes may have significant impacts on the ecosystem services, biodiversity (through habitat loss and landscape fragmentation), hydrological systems, and local climate which, in turn, may impact human health. Furthermore, increasing reliance on automobile-based modes of transportation, which is part and parcel of spatial expansion processes, results in environmental impacts from infrastructure (road corridors, service stations) and emissions.

This cyberseminar evaluated the environmental and health dimensions of urban expansion. The seminar sought to increase understanding of how spatial expansion processes in developing and developed countries are similar and how they differ, with an emphasis on the different underlying contexts (e.g. differences in policy, demographic behavior, socioeconomic and conditions, transportation systems, and markets) as well as the environmental and health outcomes. From this the seminar sought to develop a research agenda to enhance conceptual understanding of the processes, contexts, and outcomes of urban spatial expansion, and that would ultimately contribute to policy solutions. The seminar was co-organized by the IHDP Urbanization Science Project and the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Urbanization and contributed to their respective research plans. The seminar included a background paper by Dr. Charles Redman of the Center for Rapidly Urbanizing Regions at Arizona State University and a distinguished panel of experts drawn from many disciplines.

Summary

The purpose of this cyberseminar was to foster a discussion of the most pressing issues and topics for research and policy in linking air pollution (both indoor and outdoor) and human health. The seminar featured a discussion paper by PERN's former Steering Committee Chairperson, Dr. Vinod Mishra (East-West Center, Honolulu), and a panel of distinguished scientists working in this growing area of public health concern.

Cyberseminar outcomes

An article based on this cyberseminar appears in the journal Population & Environment. The full citation is:

Carr, David L., Laurel Suter, and Alisson Barbieri. 2005. "Population Dynamics and Tropical Deforestation: State of the Debate and Conceptual Challenges". Population & Environment, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 89-113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11111-005-0014-x

Summary

The seminar featured an Opening Statement by Helmut Geist and Eric Lambin and statements by an Expert Panel. Members of the Panel are Alex Pfaff, Jussi Uusivuori, Alisson Barbieri, John Sydenstricker Neto, Emilio Moran, Marcia Caldo de Castro, Jeff Fox, Don Sawyer, David Kummer, and David Carr.

The purpose of the seminar was to facilitate a thoughtful discussion, disseminate a wide variety of insights and ideas, and to promote a deeper understanding of demographic impacts on forests, in particular threatened forests, among a large group of interested researchers and experts.

Summary

This cyberseminar is based on four papers by the world's leading researchers on migration issues:

    "Why Borders Cannot be Open" by David Coleman;
    "Should Borders be Open?" by Antonio Golini;
    "Should Borders be Open?" by Charles Keely; and
    "Should Frontiers be Opened to International Migration?" by Jorge Santibanez

These papers were discussed in one of the plenary session at the IUSSP general conference in 2001, and generously provided by the IUSSP for our seminar. The seminar was initiated with a discussion by Sara Curran, a member of PERN's Steering Committee.

Cyberseminar outcomes

This seminar and the one preceding it (in October-November 2001) resulted in a Global Science Panel Statement (2 MB, PDF) that was presented at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa (September 2002).

Summary

This cyberseminar followed PERN's previous cyberseminar (see archives under "View Postings") and solicits additional reactions to the revised statement of the "Global Science Panel (GSP) on Population and Environment" which is being prepared for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, September 2002, Johannesburg ("Rio +10"). The Panel, with Maurice Strong and Nafis Sadik as patrons, comprises approximately 25 distinguished international experts from various disciplines. It seeks to assess the role of the population dimension in sustainable development and to build a bridge between the Rio and Cairo processes. The Panel has incorporated many comments from PERN's Fall 2001 cyberseminar into this draft, and seeks your further feedback.

The Global Science Panel was sponsored by IIASA, IUSSP and UNU, and coordinated by Wolfgang Lutz and Mahendra Shah of IIASA. For more information about World Summit on Sustainable Development, visit http://www.earthsummit2002.org.

Summary

This cyberseminar solicited reactions from the international research community to the Preliminary Science Statement of the "Global Science Panel (GSP) on Population and Environment" being preparing for World Summit on Sustainable Development, September 2002, Johannesburg ("Rio +10"). With Maurice Strong and Nafis Sadik as patrons, the Panel comprises about 25 distinguished international experts from various disciplines, and seeks to "assess the role of the population dimension in sustainable development and to build a bridge between the Rio and Cairo processes". The Panel seeks contributions from research community: Questions the seminar sought to address included:

• What have we learned from the past decade of research about population-environment dynamics?
• What are potential consequences of current major demographic trends for the environment?
• What are consequences of environmental changes at many levels for population dynamics and human welfare?

The Global Science Panel was sponsored by IIASA, IUSSP and UNU, and coordinated by Wolfgang Lutz and Mahendra Shah of IIASA. For more information about World Summit on Sustainable Development, visit http://www.earthsummit2002.org.

Summary

This seminar included research funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Population, Consumption and Environment (PCE) initiative. The focus is on population dynamics and the environment in coastal areas. There are three papers:

• A study of migration and livelihood trajectories in coastal Vietnam (Adger et al.);
• A study of migration and remittance income as it relates to the use of mangrove resources in Micronesia (Naylor et al.); and
• A study of population and consumption impacts on a mangrove ecosystem in El Salvador (Gammage et al.).

Comments were made with respect to approach, variables, methodology, findings or policy relevance of each of the papers.

Summary

This pilot cyberseminar attempted to deal with some of the conceptual and practical issues involved in formulating a more meaningful population-environment agenda. Essentially, it asks - what can be done about environmental issues from a population perspective, in the framework of the new millenium? How and what can the knowledge, skills and tools of the population sciences effectively contribute to sustainability, via research, policy and action? It assumes that improving the relevance and specificity of the work on P-E linkages begins with a restatement of the problem; concurrently, these linkages have to be viewed more directly within the context of the prevailing development scenario.