Population and the Environment: Analytical Demography and Applied Population Ethics/AndyRominger

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Notes by user Andy Rominger (SFI) for Population and the Environment: Analytical Demography and Applied Population Ethics

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

Presentation highlights

Open questions that came up

How your perspective changed

Impact on your own work

e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

This has been a great meeting with many good ideas and excellent people. I was left with several thoughts: populations in wealthier countries have lower fertility: why? This was from Mary's talk and is really fascinating. In particular I wonder how economic pressures versus cultural pressures drive this. In my very naive view I can mostly think of cultural reasons--cultural pressures that empower women and change symbols of status away from family size for example; and the economic pressures would seem to work in the opposite direction: it should be economically easier to have more children in wealthy countries, connecting to observations Partha presented earlier. And yet, Mary's work points to economic drivers being more statistically supported--I'll be excited to engage with her findings more. Also, again born of my ignorance on the subject, I wondered when we speak of morality around populations, how do we avoid arguments that facilitate (while not explicitly being) eugenic views on who should reproduce and who should not? If evolution drives populations to higher fitness can fitness maximization be a moral construct?

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Reference material notes

Some examples:

Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).

Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)

This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!

Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Keil et al. (2015) Nature Communications: derives the best math for calculating species loss under habitat loss.

Mendenhall et al. (2014) Nature: shows how human use of landscapes does not render them devoid of biodiversity and the consequences there of for conservation.

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Reference Materials

Title	Author name	Source name	Year	Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days.	Page views	Related file
Predicting biodiversity change and averting collapse in agricultural landscapes	Chase D. Mendenhall, Daniel S. Karp, Christoph F.J. Meyer, Elizabeth A. Hadly, Gretchen C. Daily	Nature	2014	202	22
On the decline of biodiversity due to area loss	Petr Keil, David Storch, Walter Jetz	Nature Communications	2015	39	5