The Environment - Population Project  forms the first component of the new Demography and Environment Strand, addressing the complex environmental interactions which will form an increasing feature of the 21st Century.

The challenge raised by the interactions of global climate change and rapidly changing demographic structures throughout the world carries both opportunities, if successfully managed, and significant risks if public policy interventions fail. The impact of population change upon the environment, and conversely that of environmental change upon populations, has been to a surprising extent ignored by most environmentalists and demographers, and when it has been considered, the issue of population growth has dominated the analysis, to the almost complete neglect of key dynamics in population structure:  age structural transitions, spatial distributions, cohort changes. Yet the interaction of age structural changes, urbanisation and migration is likely to have a significant, as yet unknown, effect. 

Title of Research:

The Research Complex Environmental Population Interactions Project unites key demographers, economists, anthropologists, philosophers and environmentalists to address - through research, modelling and scenarios - the range of complex interactions between environmental and demographic change over the first half of the 21st century:

• Project 1: In preparation for the development of this programme, a workshop was held in Kobe with funding from the Diawa Foundation.  This enabled a collaboration between the OIA, the Department of Architecture (Cambridge) and the Royal College of Art to develop research into demographic change, climate change and the built environment.

• Project 2: a small pilot grant has been granted by DEFRA to work with the Environmental Change Institute (Oxford) to examine access to food in an world affected by demographic and climate change.

• Project 3:  has now been developed in collaboration with Cambridge to examine future hospitals which will serve the needs of both an ageing population and a changing climate. Funding is being sought for this research.

• Project 4:  Under development with the Royal College of Art to consider transport needs for older people in the light of environmental change.

• Project 5:  In collaboration with Cambridge and the Royal College of Art to look at built cities which are both environmentally and age friendly.