International Handbook of Population and Environment

This handbook presents a timely and comprehensive overview of theory, data, methods and research findings that connect human population dynamics and environmental context. It presents regional summaries of empirical findings on migration and environmental connections and summarizes environmental impacts of migration – such as urbanization and deforestation. It also offers background on the health implications of environmental conditions such as climate change, natural disasters, scarcity of natural resources, as well as on resource scarcity and fertility, gender considerations in population and environment, and the connections between population size, growth, composition and carbon emissions. This handbook helps readers to better understand the complexities within population-environment connections, in addition to some of the opportunities and challenges within environmental demography. As such this collection is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and policy analysts in the areas of demography, migration, fertility, health and mortality, as well as environmental, global and development studies.

Lori Hunter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also Director of the CU Population Center within in the Institute of Behavioral Science. Dr. Hunter’s research focuses on population dynamics as related to environmental context with a primary emphasis on migration as a livelihood strategy among natural resource-dependent communities in rural South Africa. She also works on issues of data confidentiality in population-environment research.

 

Clark Gray is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research integrates data and methods from the population and spatial sciences to investigate the consequences of environmental change for vulnerable households in the developing world. A primary contribution has been to quantify environmental influences on human migration  in more than twenty developing countries.

 

Jacques Véron is demographer and emeritus research director at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). He has been deputy director of INED. His research focus on population dynamics, environmental change and development. He has conducted surveys in India, in particular on international migration.  He has also an interest for the demography of extreme events.