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This book broadens and deepens understanding of a wide range of population-climate change linkages. Incorporating population dynamics into research, policymaking and advocacy around climate change is critical for understanding trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions, for developing and implementing adaptation plans and thus for global and national efforts to curtail this threat. The papers in this volume provide a substantive and methodological guide to the current state of knowledge on issues such as population growth and size and emissions; population vulnerability and adaptation linked to health, gender disparities and children; migration and urbanization; and the data and analytical needs for the next stages of policy-relevant research.
This report discusses the relationship between population and environmental change, the forces that mediate this relationship, and how population dynamics specifically affect climate change and land-use change.
Rising sea levels and altered weather patterns are expected to significantly alter coastal and inland environments for humans, infrastructure and ecosystems. Potential land-use changes and population increases, coupled with uncertain predictions for sea level rise and storm frequency/intensity represent a significant planning challenge. While efforts to mitigate climate change continue, plans must be made to adapt to the risks that climate change poses to humans, infrastructure, and ecosystems alike. This book addresses integrated environmental assessment and management as part of the nexus of climate change adaptation. Risk analysis has emerged as a useful approach to guide assessment, communication and management of security risks. However, with respect to climate change, an integrated, multi-criteria, multi-hazard, risk-informed decision framework is desirable for evaluating adaptation strategies. The papers in Part 1 summarize societal and political needs for climate change adaptation. Part 2 includes papers summarizing the state of the art in climate change adaptation. Three further parts cover: the process of change in coastal regions, in inland regions, and, finally, the potential challenges to homeland security for national governments. Each of these parts reviews achievements, identifies gaps in current knowledge, and suggests research priorities.
Using Science to Improve the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program: A Way Forward reviews the science that underpins the Bureau of Land Management's oversight of free-ranging horses and burros on federal public lands in the western United States, concluding that constructive changes could be implemented. The Wild Horse and Burro Program has not used scientifically rigorous methods to estimate the population sizes of horses and burros, to model the effects of management actions on the animals, or to assess the availability and use of forage on rangelands. Evidence suggests that horse populations are growing by 15 to 20 percent each year, a level that is unsustainable for maintaining healthy horse populations as well as healthy ecosystems. Promising fertility-control methods are available to help limit this population growth, however. In addition, science-based methods exist for improving population estimates, predicting the effects of management practices in order to maintain genetically diverse, healthy populations, and estimating the productivity of rangelands. Greater transparency in how science-based methods are used to inform management decisions may help increase public confidence in the Wild Horse and Burro Program.
Population and Climate Change provides the first systematic in-depth treatment of links between two major themes of the 21st century: population growth (and associated demographic trends such as aging) and climate change. It is written by a multidisciplinary team of authors from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis who integrate both natural science and social science perspectives in a way that is comprehensible to members of both communities. The book will be of primary interest to researchers in the fields of climate change, demography, and economics. It will also be useful to policy-makers and NGOs dealing with issues of population dynamics and climate change, and to teachers and students in courses such as environmental studies, demography, climatology, economics, earth systems science, and international relations.
This book explores how individuals and communities perceive and understand climate change using their observations of change in the world around them. Because processes of climatic change operate at spatial and temporal scales that differ from those of everyday practice, the phenomenon can be difficult to understand. However, flora and fauna, which are important natural and cultural resources for human communities, do respond to the pressures of environmental change. Humans, in turn, observe and adapt to those responses, even when they may not understand their causes. Much of the discussion about human experiences of our changing climate centers on disasters and extreme events, but we argue that a focus on the everyday, on the microexperiences of change, has the advantage of revealing how people see, feel, and make sense of climate change in their own lives. The chapters of this book are drawn from Asia, Europe, Africa, and South and North America. They use ethnographic inquiry to understand local knowledge and perceptions of climate change and the social and ecological changes inextricably intertwined with it. Together, they illustrate the complex process of coming to know climate change, show some of the many ways that climate change and our responses to it inflict violence, and point to promising avenues for moving toward just and authentic collaborative responses.
Many species are expected to undergo significant distributional shifts in response to changes in climate. This adaptive response can impact population dynamics in many ways, including decreasing reproductive fitness, limiting dispersal, shrinking habitat, and exposing organisms to new competition from invasive species. What determines the successful persistence of a population exposed to climate change? In this dissertation I address different aspects of this fundamental question in three chapters. In the first chapter, I focus on the challenges of modeling asymmetric dispersal. I use a spatially explicit integro-difference equation (IDE) to model a population whose habitat is shifting due to climate change, and demonstrate its equivalence to a stationary IDE model with asymmetric dispersal behavior. The cumulative effects of population dispersal in space and time have been described with some success by Van Kirk and Lewis's average dispersal success approximation (Van Kirk and Lewis, 1997), but this approximation has been demonstrated to perform poorly when applied to asymmetric dispersal. I provide a comparison of different characterizations of dispersal success and demonstrate how to accurately approximate the effects of asymmetric dispersal with a method known as geometric symmetrization. I apply these different methods to a variety of IDE population models with asymmetric dispersal, and I examine the methods' effectiveness in approximating key ecological traits of the models, such as the critical patch size and the critical speed of climate change for population persistence. I show that the method using geometric symmetrization performs considerably better than other approximations for a variety of models and across a wide range of parameter values. In the second chapter, I examine a coupled system of IDEs that models two species competing for the same resources in a shifting habitat. I determine under what conditions the two populations can coexist and the criteria for persistence in a changing climate. I demonstrate how the speed of climate change can shift the stable-state solution of the population model from mutual coexistence to a single species outcompeting the other and how these effects can be mitigated by niche differentiation, with the potential for habitat considered inhospitable to one species to provide refuge for the other. I illustrate this model with a simulated population of native bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) experiencing competition from invasive brook trout (S. fontinalis) as their river habitat warms due to climate change. Based on current climate projections, this simulation suggests that bull trout are likely to disappear from the study area by 2080, with brook trout expanding their range in the absence of competition. In the third chapter, I describe a new type of model that combines climate-envelope modeling with IDEs to utilize the strengths of both correlative and process-based modeling. I apply this framework to a case study of the American pika (Ochotona princeps), a small montane mammal that is widely recognized as threatened by climate change, and compare this with both a traditional climate-envelope model and an IDE. The results suggest that climate-envelope models alone can substantially underestimate the impacts of climate change, but the predictions of integro-difference models can be considerably improved by incorporating the modeled climate envelope.
Population, Land Use, and Environment: Research Directions offers recommendations for future research to improve understanding of how changes in human populations affect the natural environment by means of changes in land use, such as deforestation, urban development, and development of coastal zones. It also features a set of state-of-the-art papers by leading researchers that analyze population-land useenvironment relationships in urban and rural settings in developed and underdeveloped countries and that show how remote sensing and other observational methods are being applied to these issues. This book will serve as a resource for researchers, research funders, and students.
Policymakers around the world are increasingly concerned about the likely impact of climate change and environmental degradation on the movement of people. This book takes a hard look at the existing evidence available to policymakers in different regions of the world. How much do we really know about the impact of environmental change on migration? How will different regions of the world be affected in the future? Is there evidence to show that migration can help countries adapt to environmental change ? What types of research have been conducted, how reliable is the evidence? These are some of the questions considered in this book, which presents, for the first time, a synthesis of relevant research findings for each major region of the world. Written by regional experts, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the key findings of existing studies on the linkages between environmental change and the movement of people. More and more reports on migration and the environment are being published, but the information is often scattered between countries and within regions, and it is not always clear how much of this information is based on solid research. This book brings this evidence together for the first time, highlighting innovative studies and research gaps. In doing this, the book seeks to help decision-makers draw lessons from existing studies and to identify priorities for further research.