Population dynamics and environmental linkages

Improving access to affordable clean energy is crutical for enhancing the quality of life. Rural households in India are almost entirely reliant on traditional biomass for cooking. This has adverse effect on health and productivity along with environmental degradation. The paper deals with three important issues, using National Sample Survey 66th round data (2009-10); Firstly, it shows the household energy use pattern in rural and urban India by economic class; Secondly, it analyzes the determinants of such use and thirdly it assess the amount of CO2 emission by Indian household using emission coefficient by fuel type. Household size, level of urbanization, literacy and age distribution of household have significant influence on type of fuel use. Monthly per capita expenditure shows a significant impact on the choice of cooking fuel. It calls for immediate interventions to protect the rural and poor households from their daily exposure of such risk factors.

Using data from the 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects from the United Nations Population Division, Natural Disaster Hotspots from the World Bank and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, air pollution database from World Bank and the World Health Organization, and the Global Agro-Ecological Zones developed by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, this study presents risks of exposures of worlds’ cities to six natural disasters (cyclones, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes, and volcanoes) for 633 cities with a population of 750,000 or more in 2011. Our results find that most cities are exposure to areas with a relatively high risk of at least one natural disaster, mainly in Asia. Cities in Asia are most polluted and 18 cities of 63 cities with inhabitants of 5 million or more in 2011 had a worsening trend in air quality in the past decade. Our results further reveal that most cities, especially in Europe and Asia, had an increase in temperature in last forty years. While half of cities had a loss in precipitation, the other half had a gain in rainfalls in last forty years. Cities in Asia and Oceania had a loss in precipitation and cities in Europe and Africa had a gain.

This study investigates land cover change and land ownership turnover in an area that is both the agricultural frontier and a priority conservation zone, the Sierra del Lacandón National Park (SLNP), Petén, Guatemala. The goal is to understand how the agricultural frontier changes over time with regard to population, household characteristics, and land use. This study analyzes panel-data consisting of household interviews conducted with farmers living within the SLNP boundaries or its buffer zone in 1998 and 2009. Despite dramatic population growth, the overall trend of the area is towards the deintensification of farming practices. On average, households crop larger areas of higher value crops and less maize, but these changes have not kept pace with pasture expansion. As in Latin America overall, pasture expansion is a main driver of deforestation. The area simultaneously experiences farm parcel consolidation and splintering. Half of the landowning households in 1998 sold their land by 2009; some such land was consolidated by large landholders, while other parcels became split among multiple owners. Understanding land cover changes over time and how land ownership turnover occurs is key for crafting policies aimed at slowing further forest clearing and the impoverishment of subsistence populations.

Although sub-Saharan Africa does not contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, significant adverse impacts of climate change are anticipated in this region. Countries in West Africa, which are heavily dependent on rain-fed agriculture, are projected to experience more frequent and intense droughts, altered rainfall patterns and increases in temperature through the end of this century. The changes in climate pattern are likely to affect crop yields, thereby placing pressure on scarce resources in a region that is characterized by limited social, political, technical and financial resources. This paper assessed the preferred adaptation strategies during floods and droughts of males and females in three different occupations (farming, fishing and charcoal production). Findings are based upon an analysis of focus group discussions and ranking of preferred adaptation options in three communities in the Afram Plains of Ghana. Assessments of this nature should aid in the selection and implementation of adaptation strategies for communities and households, which is the level at which climate change adaptation is likely to occur in West Africa.

ADL and IADL indexes, both of which are self-reported limitations on the daily activities, are limited to differentiate the contextual barriers and intrinsic impairment for of disability status in the elderly population. This study examines four types of disability measurements in the Chinese elderly disability trend analysis: 1) the self-reported difficulty in IADL, 2) the self-reported dependency in ADL, 3) the self-evaluated function performance, and 4) the objective performance in function tests. The data are from three waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) in 2002, 2005 and 2008. The results showed contrasting trends under four different measurement schemes. The fact that the trends based on objective performance is reversed in comparison with trends of ADL and IADL suggests that it is likely that the ADL and IADL improvement could be largely due to the changes in the living environment of the elderly instead of the improvement of their body functions. To better understand the source of disability in the elderly population is extremely important for medical interventions, elderly care and public policy development and we call for more attentions to such a measurement problems in the disability trend studies.

Three important facts, dictated by the bio-physics of our finite planet, are widely ignored:
a) Total human impact on the planet equals, by definition, average impact per person multiplied by the number of people; so each additional person increases the rate of ecological degradation;
b) Natural resources per person are, by definition, total natural resources divided by the number of people; so each additional person increases the rate of resource depletion and reduces everyone else’s ‘share’;
c) Like growth in anything physical on a physically finite planet, population growth will definitely end at some point, either sooner by fewer births or later by more deaths; ie through contraception backed by policy and resources, or by the ‘natural’ controls by which every other species is kept in balance with its habitat - famine, disease and predation/war.
Environmentalists and economists across the UN and globally show no awareness of these, with potentially disastrous consequences. Examples are given; reasons including irrational taboos are analysed; underlying assumptions listed; the three disciplines compared; and a proactive role for population scientists proposed.

We examine how land use and livelihoods over time in the Brazilian Amazon is explained by households´ demographic composition and sources of income and welfare, and stages of frontier development. We build on the "household and land use life cycle" and the "household livelihoods" theories to relate land use and land cover change to the many components of colonists´ decision-making, individual aspirations of income and welfare and collective needs of familiar group(s) in rural settings, and how they are mediated by the context in which these decisions are made. We use a unique panel of plots and households based on field surveys carried out in the municipality of Machadinho in 1985 (288 farm households), 1986 (552 farm households), 1987 (808 farm households), 1995 (1,079 farm households), and 2010 (a sample of 259 farm households). In order to understand livelihoods dynamics we estimate cross-section and panel latent class models (Grade of Membership), this last to estimate conditional transitional probabilities from one livelihoods to others over time. We finally discuss how changing livelihood options are impacted and have consequences depending on the scale of analysis and their challenges for public policies regarding sustainable livelihoods, development and land use in the Amazon.

The attention of Indonesian government in population growth control is directing to remote areas as health and family planning services hardly reach households of these areas. This research purposes to find an alternative variable in encouraging participation of household in family planning program through correlting between access to natural resources and household size, fertility and and out-migration. A survey has been carried out in most remote area areas of West Sumatra. We found that there is strong correlation between access to natural resources and family size, fertility, and out migration. We found that, the families which have higher access to natural resources tend to have bigger family size, higher fertility and more number of out-migrants. High-access families demanded more children than low-access families as lack of labor for land cultivation in the frontier areas of West Sumatra. High-access families also have more number of out-migrant of their members as the strategy for pursuing securer livelihood. Based on the findings, providing non-natural resources based livelihood is another variable which will catalyze participation in family planning program in frontier areas.

A core prerequisite for development of the modern globalizing society is to find common points – system cohesion of various species. The authors believe forms of such unity to be closed multi-level structures called stratas. Stratas may be expressed both in evident and latent ways and they create intermittent forms in the course of acquiring self-reproducing energy – “life spreading” on Earth. This study demonstrates the possibilities provided by epistemological approach in order to identify an image and to express it in terms of statistics. The study is based on demographic variables being the variables directly associated with the process of population reproduction. The authors applied an associative approach to Macro Forecasting in this article. Subject of the research – “integration of globalizing processes as a method for visualization of demographic and physical variables and phenomena. The conceptual structure of the subject of the research is represented by DAG model range of Ms. Olga formed according to the borderline principle – “two summarizing characteristics”.

Of current concerns are the significant impacts of human influence on climate variability and change. Even though societies have been adapting to climate variability and change, evidence seem to suggest that in rural Ghana, adaptation capacity is quite low. The level of adaptation to climate change as identified in the Asante Akim South District is a function of individual household’s empowered capacity to obviate the direct impacts of climate variability and change. A survey of 120 heads of households simple randomly-sampled, were targeted with structured questionnaires and interview guides from three communities in the Asante-Akim South in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. The study revealed inter alia, that livelihoods are invariably tied to subsistent agriculture. These impacts are expressed in terms of low crop yields, low income and households’ savings from agriculture, environmental resources depletion. Farmers, as matters of urgency, adopted some coping methods and eventually adaptive strategies to sustain their livelihoods. Livelihood strategies should incorporate climate variability management measures; in view of the fact that livelihood support resources are prone to changing climatic consequences.