Dear Colleagues,

Demographic changes in size, composition, and spatial distribution have important implications for the environment, especially under changing climate conditions. Such changes, not only determine population impacts on the environment, but also affect the exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity of human societies to environmental consequences. Recent work on population and environment/energy has considered the impact of population growth, changes in population or household structure (e.g., size or age compositions) on energy consumption and land. Other work has focused on the impacts of environmental and climatic changes on demographically differentiated groups by age, gender, rural/urban residence, and education levels. Moreover, projections of future population dynamics under new socioeconomic scenarios (e.g. the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways—SSPs) are widely adopted by the climate and environmental change research communities in their research.

For this Special Issue, we encourage papers that focus on either (i) population/demographic impacts on environment/energy or (ii) the consequences of environmental changes on population. The level of analysis could be local, national, regional, or global, and methods employed could range from case-study, comparative analysis, or statistical modeling to projections. Submissions employing multidisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged. The key criteria are that the paper have demographic component(s)/implication(s).

Recent work has mostly settled aggregate population’s unitary scaling impact on environment/energy (see Liddle 2014 and O’Neill et al. 2012); and while we have a strong interest in topics surrounding the importance of cities and rural to urban migration, we are less interested in work that is too reliant/focused on the rather imprecise share of people living in urban areas or “urbanization” (see Liddle and Lung 2014 for some of the limitations of this variable). On the other hand, potential, novel, unsettled topics include:

• Changing household consumption patterns;
• Rural to urban migration;
• Energy poverty/access;
• Energy consumption and environmental dynamics in emerging economies;
• Demographic scenarios on the changing characteristics and vulnerability of population to climate change;
• Role of cities in the energy transformation (i.e., increased renewable energy).

References

Liddle, B. Impact of Population, Age Structure, and Urbanization on Greenhouse Gas Emissions/Energy Consumption: Evidence from Macro-level, Cross-country Analyses. Popul. Environ. 2014, 35, 286–304.

Liddle, B.; Lung, S. Might Electricity Consumption Cause Urbanization Instead: Evidence from Heterogeneous Panel Long-run Causality Tests. Glob. Environ. Chang. 2014, 24, 42–51.

O’Neill, B.; Liddle, B.; Jiang, L.; Smith, K.; Pachauri, S.; Dalton, M.; Fuchs, R. Demographic change and carbon dioxide emissions. Lancet 2012, 380, 157–164.

Dr. Brantley Liddle
Dr. Leiwen Jiang
Guest Editors

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• Population/demographic
• Climate change
• Environmental dynamics/environmental changes
• Energy transformation/energy poverty/energy consumption