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

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Notes by user Kaarel Sikk (University of Luxembourg) 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

As I am working with conceptualizing the formation of human settlement patterns I was searching for state of art knowledge on socio-ecological processes influencing their formation. Santa Fe and the Institute greeted me with even lot more than expected starting from eclectic societies of art and science in the city to the bold focus on "the most important" backed by art and mathematics in the SFI.

The course on population and environment offered a wide range of bits and pieces related to demographic dynamics, population size, migration, economy and spatial processes all essentially connected to my own study. All those bits and pieces created a confident methodological backgrond that significantly advances my work. Several ideas in the talks and personal exchange with other participants were directly related to my work. The themes of demographic transitions, migrations, ecosystem services gave me a lot of tought food.

Another topic I was secretly pursuing was the projection of long term processes to the future. As my own work is based on archaeological data from the past, envisioning it towards to the future creates a powerful motivator. And I did observed several very interesting trends. Although in most parts we were presented analytical aggregate models the reasoning and understanding behind those macro-level trends involved choice . So an emotional takeaway from the course for me was - if we want to project from the past to the future, we need to conceptualize our models to the level of choice, and further to the level of agency (and hopefully use agent-based models on the go).

I really thank SFI, all the organizers and participants for the great opportunity.

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Reference material notes

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• 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).

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