How Do Recent Population Trends Matter To Climate Change?
Strong evidence exists showing that demographic change is closely associated with greenhouse gas emissions, and that population dynamics will play a key role in attempts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of changes in the climate system in the future. It is clear that analyzing the compositional change of populations, specifically the age composition, the distribution of people in urban and rural areas, and household size and composition, is very important for understanding future needs and potential for mitigating carbon emissions and climate change. The analysis presented in this paper shows that by including only population size as the demographic variable in climate models, the contribution of “population” to climate change has been underestimated.
