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Population responses to environmental change: looking back, looking forward

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Abstract

Over the past two decades, population researchers have engaged in a far-reaching and productive program of research on demographic responses to changes in the natural environment. This essay “looks back” to the origins of these developments, identifying pivotal agenda-setting moments in the 1990s and tracing the impact on contemporary research. The essay also “looks forward” to identify critical gaps and challenges that remain to be addressed and to set an agenda for future research on population responses to environmental change. It recommends that the multidimensionality of environmental contexts and change be fully embraced, long run as well as short term effects be investigated, variability in the effects of environmental change in relation to social institutions, policy implementation, and environmental context be examined, movement between contexts as well as change in situ as sources of environmental change be considered, and interconnections among demographic processes in response to environmental change be explored. Taking these steps will position demographers to contribute significantly to a larger and deeper understanding of environmental change and its consequences, locally, regionally, and globally.

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Notes

  1. Evans had had success using grants programs to jump-start research areas before, notably, in the areas of teen pregnancy, immigration, and family demography.

  2. Evans pointed to this, along with the National Academy of Sciences workshop on population and land use (Jolly & Torrey, 1993) and some interest by NIEHS as key to NICHD’s approval of the RFA and grants program.

  3. Incorporating measures of the social and natural environment may require demographers to consider potentially cross-cutting contexts, e.g., when policy-relevant units such as counties or states do not correspond to environmentally-relevant units such as watersheds.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marcy Carlson, Malia Jones, and Katherine J. Curtis for inviting me to give the keynote address for their conference, “Demographic Responses to Changes in the Natural Environment” held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, supported in part by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (R13 HD096853). I appreciate their many helpful suggestions as I developed this review essay from that address. I would also like to thank the Population and Environment editor, Elizabeth Fussell, for her advice about how the essay could be improved. I am grateful to V. Jeffrey Evans for sharing the history of the NICHD/NIEHS grants program in the 1990s. Finally, I would like to acknowledge general support from the Carolina Population Center (NICHD P2C HD050924).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3210, USA

    Barbara Entwisle

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Entwisle, B. Population responses to environmental change: looking back, looking forward. Popul Environ 42, 431–444 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-021-00382-w

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