Population dynamics and environmental linkages

Diarrhoea and Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) are two common causes of mortality and morbidity among children under five years in India. The paper explores the prevalence and determinants of these two diseases using NFHS-3 (2005-06) data. Prevalence of both these diseases is highest in the Eastern region of India. Step wise regression analysis at all India level reveals that time for getting water outside premises, type of house and crowding at household are major household environmental determinants of child diarrhoea. Probability of suffering from ARI is significantly more among those using unclean fuel. The likelihood of having ARI is considerably less in seasons other than winter. Chances of suffering from ARI in the East, Central and North-East India compared to the North Indian region are mainly due to household environmental variations. Regional differences are observed in determinants of two diseases in six geographic regions. Indian Five year plan must prioritize provision and improvement of basic needs like clean cooking fuel, proximity to water source and concrete housing structure to reduce childhood diseases.

Delhi, the national Capital of India attracts millions of poor migrants from the hinterland and most of them find shelter in slums and squatter settlements as they are unable to afford formal housing. Slum development has become the matter of politico-economic concern for Delhi Government, especially, after the Commonwealth Games (2010) because of large scale removal of slum from the city core to the periphery and its adverse impact on the living environment of the urban poor. Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI) has been constructed (using Census of India, 2001 and 2011 data) for identifying vulnerability zones and 400 households have been surveyed from these zones. This composite index has been computed by using following variables, viz., Percentage of households having none of the specified assets, household living in informal houses and slums, household without electricity, potable drinking water and sanitation, household having no access to banking service, safe cooking fuel or LPG. Various statistical methods like Binary Logistics, Cross-tabulation, SD, Mean and Chi-Square have been applied for primary analysis. Main findings reveal that slum households located in the core city have legitimacy, tenure security, better living environment, better housing amenities, sound health and positive behaviour psychology than those

This study focuses on urban residents’ migration experience in the last 5 years (2007-11) and migration intentions in the next 2 years (2012-13) and their predictors in two cities – Shanghai and Nanjing – of the Yangtze River deltaic region, China. A combination of stratified sampling and simple random sampling methods and structured questionnaire surveys were used to collect primary data at the household level. Probit regression analysis methods were used to explore the factors that influence households’ past migration behaviours and future migration intentions. Specifically, possible impacts of climate/environmental change on past and future migration are measured in two ways: severity of climatic and other environmental events; and specific domains of the effects of climate/environmental change. The study demonstrates climatic/environmental factors play a significant role in influencing human mobility. The impact of climate change on migration is mediated by influencing household’s housing situation, daily expenditure, and general health status. Both past migration and intended future migration are also mediated by the age of the household head, housing types, accessibility to medical services, and target destinations of migration.

Environmental pollution is a global problem. In India, it has assumed threatening proportions mainly due to poverty, continuing forest devastation, the negative impact of economic development, and sheer greed. Since independence in 1947, the Indian ecosystem has received some major setbacks as a result of haphazard industrial and urban development. Of the country's 304 million hectares 50% are subject to ecological degradation. About 80 % of the population lives under substandard conditions. The 14 major rivers, including the Ganga, which provide nearly 85% of the country's drinking water, are all polluted. City dwellers breathe clean air for about 2 hours in the morning. Human diseases caused by contaminated or substandard food have doubled during the last 30 years. Over 80 % of all hospital patients are the victims of environmental pollution.

The official response to the centuries’ old land concentration problem in Brazil has been the colonization of new areas, most notably in the Amazon region. Nonetheless, the so called “Amazonia Legal” also encompasses biomes other than tropical forests, including patches of savannas. This is the case of Central Roraima, where colonization projects have been created in savanna areas, where agriculture is much harder to sustain without the appropriate tools and techniques, and where natural resources are more scant than those found in forested areas. The colonization project Nova Amazônia, located in the municipality of Boa Vista is emblematic. The project was created in 2003 and after ten years of existence it experiences high abandonment rates and a significant re-functionalization, as most plots sold by peasants to upper middle class urban workers of Boa Vista have been converted into weekend homes. A sample of 200 colonists was recorded in Nova Amazônia and migration histories, agricultural experience and practices, and settlers’ relationship with the local environment were explored. Results indicate among the causes of land abandonment colonists’ lack of previous experience in savanna environments, as most settlers came either from urban areas, the semi-arid Northeast or the Pampa areas of South Brazil.

Increasingly, the field of migration has become interested in understanding the links between migration and environmental distress—to what extent these links exist, how they manifest, and what might mediate them. Using nationally representative data from the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey in 2009, this paper explores the impact of environmental shocks on international migration from Cambodia. First, the paper uses multi-level modeling to assess the extent to which village experiences of drought, flood, and crop failure in 2008 are associated with household incidence of international migration in the following year. The paper then explores how these patterns differ by household characteristics. In particular it considers how local environmental shocks interact with household experience of crop loss to better understand whether migration responses to environmental distress are related to direct income loss or are broader responses to increased vulnerability. By disaggregating the importance of environmental shocks among households who experience varying degrees of loss as a result, it contributes to a more complex understanding of how floods, drought, and crop loss at a village level interact with household-level characteristics to influence patterns of international migration.

Timor-Leste has one of the poorest and fastest growing populations in the world and its economy is nearly entirely dependent on its non-renewable natural resources. 75% of its population lives in rural areas and depend on forests for their livelihoods. Timor-Leste has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. With rapid population growth and a lack of sustainable population strategy, challenges such as unsustainable land-use, shifting agriculture and illegal cutting of trees for fuelwood or cash incomes will put tremendous pressure on the environment. Unfortunately preservation of the environment is not a national priority and existing laws and regulations concerning the environment are ill suited to the prevailing conditions in rural areas.
The analysis of this paper, based on primary data collected in the field in 2011-12, shows that there is a strong link between high fertility preference, poverty and forest dependency. While almost 93% of the households collect forest products for multiple puposes, 22% of households indicate that they use forests as safety nets. With forests holding potentials for poverty reduction, it is important to develop good environmental management strategies to ensure their sustainability despite an expanding population and strenghten their contribution to the national economy.

This paper seeks to improve the understanding of the household-level dynamics (life-cycle) and its relationship to agricultural practices, land use & environmental perception focusing on long-settled communities in the Andes.
A primary data generation (the 3-Paute survey) has been carried out obtaining 239 surveyed households. Gathered data have been analyzed by the Factor Analysis for Mixed Data (FMDA), the Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components (HCPC); as well as Chi2 (test of independence), ANOVA & Kruskal-Wallis tests.
The presented findings advance our understanding of the complex dynamics in long-settled communities in the Andes region in five ways: 1) some household life-cycle variables influence the availability of the household labor force, that may impact the diversification of economic activities and cropping, the type of agriculture, and the use of intensive and/or extensive agriculture; 2) gender roles are well defined in function of the production scale; 3) we argue that household access to hired labor and focus on profit beyond subsistence; 4) migration plays an important role on the different dynamics under study mainly on wealthy households; and 5) the local livelihoods, adaptations, and environmental outcomes extend beyond a focus on macro-level to those operating at the household life-cycle level.

In the long history of human civilization man has changed the natural environment of the earth as step by step. Recently it enhanced by the technologically developed modern mankind. Population pressure may be the direct causes of environmental degradation in the fragile landscape. High rainfall affected tropical mountainous region of the world are most sensitive to environmental problem due to extreme and unplanned growth. Agriculture, construction and other economic activities triggered mass movement, soil erosion and other related problem in these regions. The present paper highlights the environmental problems of Darjeeling Himalaya by increasing population pressure, consequence with their activities; in the perspective of landslide and soil erosion. Census data of different decades have been used to analyses the population growth, whether satellite imageries used to analyses spatial and temporal dimension of hazard. The result shows that most of the landslides occur in the human modification landscape or near the construction sites. So it is clearly pointed out that anthropogenic activities are responsible for the above problems.

Yaoundé as the others main cities of Africa faced a rapid urbanization during recent decades. And to respond to this increasing urban population needs, many activities and practices have been developed with negatives impacts on the environment such as the accentuation of climate change. Hence, according to the IPCC, Equatorial Africa could warm by 1.4 ° C by 2050 and rapid urbanization will be one of the main responsible. This article aims to contribute to the knowledge on how the growth of cities in less developed countries affects the global warming, with a focus on the perceptions and attitudes of citizens of Yaoundé toward the phenomenon. The study we will base on thorough individual interviews conducted with people who have been living in Yaoundé for at least two decades. The exploitation of data will consists of a preliminary analysis and a thematic content analysis associated with the construction of typology