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Demographic aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation a
Wolfgang Lutz & Erich Striessnig
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Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU) Published online: 26 Apr 2015.
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Population Studies, 2015 Vol. 69, No. S1, S69–S76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2014.969929
Demographic aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation Wolfgang Lutz and Erich Striessnig
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Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU)
This paper addresses the contribution of changes in population size and structures to greenhouse gas emissions and to the capacity to adapt to climate change. The paper goes beyond the conventional focus on the changing composition by age and sex. It does so by addressing explicitly the changing composition of the population by level of educational attainment, taking into account new evidence about the effect of educational attainment in reducing significantly the vulnerability of populations to climatic challenges. This evidence, which has inspired a new generation of socio-economic climate change scenarios, is summarized. While the earlier IPCC-SRES (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) scenarios only included alternative trajectories for total population size (treating population essentially as a scaling parameter), the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) in the new scenarios were designed to capture the socio-economic challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and include full age, sex, and education details for all countries.
Keywords: education; demographic change; behavioural change; climate change; mitigation; adaptation
An intervention-science approach to population and climate change interactions The social sciences face great challenges in addressing effectively the issue of global environmental change. Much of our scientific work takes a rather specific disciplinary approach and only focuses on narrow aspects of this major interdisciplinary challenge. While much of our thinking about the world is compartmentalized, the real world that we try to understand and the future course of which we try to anticipate is highly interconnected. Its study calls for an analytical systems approach. In this context it has recently been suggested that it is useful to structure the broad range of all the social sciences and humanities into what have been labelled identity sciences and intervention sciences (Lutz 2012). While the former address the questions about who we are and where we are coming from, the notion of ‘intervention sciences’ refers to the study of where we are going and what actions (interventions) can influence the future course of events under certain conditions. At the individual level this refers to theories of human behaviour, at the societal level it calls for theories of socioeconomic change with predictive power (Lutz 2013). While the behaviour of people as individuals or as groups tends to be less deterministic than most © 2015 Population Investigation Committee
of the processes studied in the natural sciences, there is no reason not to propose models of social change in which the consequences of interventions for future outcomes are predicted within specified uncertainty ranges. This approach is exemplified by Lutz and KC (2011), who considered educational attainment as a relevant demographic characteristic in addition to age and sex. They showed, for several decades into the future, how interventions in the form of different levels of the expansion of education produce not only different distributions of educational attainment but also different total population sizes and levels of child mortality. This is because fertility and child mortality vary in consistent and predictable ways with the level of mother’s education. In times of accelerating social change around the world, understanding and modelling the systematic and predictable elements of social change are needed more than ever before. The challenges that societies face in the form of man-made climate change require interventions in the near term which are based not only on natural scientific evidence but also on scientific analyses of the social relations and structures which may enhance or reduce vulnerability to future climate conditions. Hardly any challenges in the twenty-first century are greater than those arising from the interaction of demographic
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change and climate change. Moreover, we know with near certainty that future global climatic conditions and the size and structure of global populations will be different from those observed today. To address climate change and changes in the socio-economic structures of the human population in scientific fashion, we need models with predictive power on both sides. And here we observe a major asymmetry. There are numerous ‘big science’ projects dealing with climate change in the natural sciences, involving highly sophisticated Global Circulation Models with thousands of scientists providing projections with uncertainty ranges of the response of temperature and precipitation to different concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, there is almost nothing comparable in scale and effort in the humanities and social sciences. Nonetheless, they have an equally important question to address, namely, to identify the likely future structures and capabilities of human populations that are available to cope with expected future climate conditions. Arising from this asymmetry, most estimates of the likely level of future human suffering induced by climate change—for instance, the estimates by the World Health Organization of additional malaria deaths in the highlands of Eastern Africa—assume that future climate conditions will affect societies that have remained at a stage in their socio-economic development and public health capabilities similar to those on the same territory today. Studying the interactions between two evolving systems by assuming that one (climate) changes significantly and the other (human population and development) is frozen at its current conditions is an untenable, if not absurd, approach to the study of this important issue. The reason for this unsatisfactory situation may lie in the fact that there are very few models that can provide alternative future scenarios of population and human development. However, even given this uncertainty, the persistence of present conditions is clearly not the best assumption. As demographers, we know with near certainty that the future population in, say, Eastern Africa will be larger, older, and probably better educated than it is today. Moreover, these changes, together with associated social and economic changes, will significantly influence the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of human societies in the second half of our century. In almost all countries the younger generations are on average better educated than the older ones, so the average education of the adult population in the future will improve. That is likely to improve economic growth and the governance of public health (Lutz 2014).
Different near-term interventions through education policies can lead to different long-term socioeconomic development pathways that matter both for the mitigation of climate change and adaptation to it. This will be discussed later in the paper in the context of the new Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) that have been developed in partnership with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Figure 1 represents graphically the complex relationship between population dynamics and the climate system. On the lower left side of the figure, we see the effects of changes in the human population on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the resulting climate change. While in early studies of this effect only the absolute size of the population was assumed to matter (Ehrlich and Holdren 1971), now there is growing recognition that people differ in important ways in their demographic characteristics in respect of human energy consumption and emissions (O’Neill et al. 2001). The Figure illustrates that the solutions to mitigation, that is, reductions in emissions, depend on technological advance and behavioural changes. This capacity for innovation will again depend on the demographic composition of the population and in particular on its level of education. However, the ability to cope with the consequences of climate change also varies greatly at the level of the individual, the household, and the community. Differential vulnerability according to demographic characteristics such as age, sex, place of residence, or level of education has to be taken into account when assessing the likely impacts of changing climate conditions on mortality, health, livelihood, or migration.
Demographic drivers of mitigation The classical I = PAT model, disaggregating humanity’s overall impact on the environment, still assumed that the effects of population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T) were separable. However, more recent analyses (MacKellar et al. 1995; O’Neill et al. 2001, 2010) show that future carbon emissions will be driven not just by population size but also by the distribution of the population by age, sex, education, place of residence, household size, and other relevant characteristics. Future societies, by any account, will be much older than present ones, they will be more urban, and they will be more educated. All of this affects lifestyles and consumption patterns, and also innovative potential: the ability to find solutions and to cope with unavoidable aspects of climate change. How many people
Interaction of population and climate change
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Regional effects on: – temperature – humidity – extreme events (storms) – sea-level rise
Global Climate Change
Differential vulnerability
Livelihood GHG emissions
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Consumption
Health/Mortality
Migration
Technology
Human Population
Innovation
By age, sex, level of education, place of residence, and household structure
Closing the full circle of population and climate change
No education Primary Secondary Tertiary
Figure 1 Closing the full circle of mitigation (on the left) and vulnerability and adaptation (on the right) of population and climate change interactions Source: Lutz 2009a. the Earth ultimately can support is not only a question of population size, it also depends on the capabilities of those people inhabiting it (Cohen 1995). A recent body of literature has suggested that in addition to the conventional demographic differentiation by age and sex, educational attainment should be included routinely as a third demographic dimension in all studies of population dynamics, thus introducing a dimension of ‘quality’. That dimension is highly relevant for understanding the interactions between population and climate change. While the importance of education as an empowering factor is clear and straightforward in the case of adaptation to climate change—as will be discussed in the following section—its role in mitigation is more complex. In the high-fertility contexts of much of the less developed world, the main impact of
education is through its effect on fertility. Mediated by a desire for smaller family sizes representing the move from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’ of children, education reduces population growth. However, education also typically enhances economic growth, makes people more affluent, and helps to bring people out of poverty (Lutz et al. 2008; Crespo et al. 2013). While this is a highly desirable outcome from a development perspective, reduced poverty also means—at least under current technological realities —higher consumption and thus more CO2 emissions. This makes some environmental activists, those concerned only with reducing emissions and not with reducing poverty, sceptical about the value of education in the context of mitigation. In order to avoid playing poverty eradication and increases in well-being against climate change
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mitigation, it is necessary to look at behavioural differences at given levels of income. Recent evidence from US households shows that better educated people tend to consume in more eco-friendly ways at any given level of income, particularly when it comes to spending on home energy and transportation by car. These are two of the most important sources of household-level atmospheric GHG production (Sharygin 2013). Thus, it can be argued that education will play a major role in mitigating the impact on CO2 emissions of otherwise desirable increases in incomes. That this is not only a Western phenomenon is shown by a study on fuel choices in urban Indian households (Farsi et al. 2007), where the level of education reveals a similar potential for mitigation. Illiterate household heads, or those with only primary education, are more likely to choose firewood or kerosene as a cooking fuel. However, households where the head has a higher level of education are more likely to use liquid petroleum gas (LPG), which has clear efficiency, health, and environmental benefits. For instance, households with illiterate heads are on average about 22 per cent more likely than those with a secondary school education (the base category) to use wood and about 34 per cent less likely to use LPG. In another study on the mitigation potential of lifestyles and related consumer choices by Pronello and Camusso (2011), the level of education and age are the only socio-economic and demographic characteristics that influence choices in favour of more environmentally friendly modes of transport. In a cluster analysis of the mobility patterns of travellers in an Italian city, they show that age and education distinguish clusters strongly, while sex, family size, and income are irrelevant indicators. Because it is mainly the young and better educated who show more sustainable behaviour as well as a more positive attitude to change, the authors recommend that education should be seen as an addition to traditional interventions for the management of the supply of transportation. An adequate educational policy addressed to mobility has to make use of the dynamics of ‘demographic metabolism’—the replacement of older generations by younger ones— and start with the young generations to achieve a social transformation in the long run. The demographic and behavioural factors discussed above in their very nature evolve only slowly and gradually. However, much more powerful nearterm forces of successful mitigation come from technological innovations that reduce fossil fuel consumption radically while maintaining or improving the standard of living. The associated notion of
‘green growth’ has become a powerful catchword in the context of the Rio+20 International Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. However, the technologies needed to justify such optimism do not yet exist and will not exist at an affordable cost in the near future. Hence, hope rests strongly on the future innovative potential of societies. While the appearance of specific innovations is impossible to predict, it is generally agreed that a high general level of education enlarges the pool of potential successful innovators and enhances the appreciation of science and research in society. Without that, democratic states will not make the investments in basic research which fosters such innovations.
Human capital and vulnerability/adaptability to climate change In recent years the response of the international community to climate change has moved gradually from an almost exclusive focus on mitigation to giving more attention to the need to prepare for adaptation to climate change that is already unavoidable. That went hand in hand with a growing recognition that in assessing people’s vulnerability, their demographic characteristics and capabilities are important as well as where they live. A recent international scientific panel on ‘Demography’s Role in Sustainable Development’ emphasized the need to: (i) Recognize that the numbers, characteristics, and behaviour of people are at the heart of sustainable development challenges and of their solutions. (ii) Identify subpopulations that contribute most to environmental degradation and those that are most vulnerable to its consequences. In poor countries especially, these subpopulations are readily identifiable according to age, gender, level of education, place of residence, and standard of living. (Lutz et al. 2012, p. 918)
This focus on differential vulnerability is a recent development in the research community dealing with natural disasters and adaptation, whose primary focus has been traditionally on location. However, the importance of demographic factors, in particular the changing educational composition of the population, in affecting the future impact of climate change on human survival and well-being has been the topic of a recent special issue of Ecology and Society (Butz et al. 2014). Several contributions find strong evidence, both at the micro-level and the macro-level, of the risk-reducing potential of education, which enables individuals to acquire knowledge, skills, and competencies that can
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Interaction of population and climate change influence their adaptive capacity and thus reduce risk. An individual-level study of preparedness for disaster during the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes among households located along the Andaman coast in Phang Nga province found that formal education —measured at individual, household, and community level—increased the likelihood of precautionary action being taken (Muttarak and Pothisiri 2013). While having been affected by the 2004 tsunami clearly increased preparedness for an emergency, education emerged as a relevant factor in anticipating risk and taking precautionary steps among persons without such disaster experience. Another study by Frankenberg et al. (2013), using longitudinal survey data collected in two provinces on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, examined the extent to which education protects individuals from natural disaster. They found that education clearly played a role in coping with the disaster over the longer term, with the better educated enjoying better psychosocial health 5 years after the tsunami. They were less likely than others to live under precarious living conditions and were better at compensating for loss of income following the tsunami. Similar evidence on the association between education and vulnerability has been reported at the community level. KC (2013) found that education level strongly mitigated damage from floods and landslides in terms of human lives lost, animals lost, and other damage to households using comprehensive village-level data for Nepal (a microsample of the 2001 census covering 2.5 million individuals together with disaster data for 2000–09). Comparing the effect of education with those of income and wealth, the author concludes that education has a stronger and more consistent effect in reducing damage. A comparative study by Wamsler et al. (2012) on two low-income settlements in Brazil and El Salvador, where climate-related disasters are recurrent, yields similar conclusions. The level of education was found to be negatively correlated with the level of exposure to risk. The effect arose directly and indirectly: directly by reducing existing risks through greater awareness and better understanding, and indirectly by protecting against poor health, organized crime, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, or informal settlement growth. In addition to that, they found evidence that education may be the key to another prime coping strategy in adapting to climate change, namely, migrating out of the affected high-risk area (Adqer and Adams 2013). Evidence on environmentally induced migration from
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Mali and Senegal strongly confirms this finding (van der Land and Hummel 2013). Another study by Garbero and Muttarak (2013) investigated the impacts of floods and droughts on community welfare in Thailand. Based on Thai government surveys of living conditions and life quality in 68,695 rural villages for 2009–11, the paper uses difference-in-difference methods to analyse how floods and droughts in 2010 affected consumption and income of the villages in 2011. It found that communities with higher average educational attainment, unlike others, did not experience a reduction in consumption, investment in agriculture, or a decline in income. A further analysis demonstrates that communities with high average levels of education are more able to secure government financial aid for areas affected by floods and droughts. Again building on the evidence from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a study by Muttarak et al. (2012) on 286 villages in Phang Nga province in Thailand that suffered the most severe losses, showed that preparation for extreme climate events and natural disasters are driven by past experience and anticipation of such events in the future. In addition, villages with a higher proportion of village members with at least secondary education are more likely to prepare for potential natural disasters. Similarly, Pichler and Striessnig (2013) used data from qualitative interviews conducted in Cuba and the Dominican Republic to compare these two island states with regard to disaster vulnerability. Even though they are fairly similar in their exposure to natural extreme events, the outcomes of disasters vary greatly between the two islands. While effective disaster response is strongly embedded in the minds of the entire Cuban population, which is one of the most educated in the less developed world, the lack of education and literacy in the Dominican Republic made its people more vulnerable and prevented them even from understanding warnings about forthcoming danger. Using national-level time series of disaster fatalities around the world, a study by Striessnig et al. (2013) found significant evidence for the role of education in reducing disaster fatalities. On the other hand, contrary to popular assumptions, there was no evidence for the role of income per head in reducing vulnerability once other key determinants of socio-economic development and exposure to risk had been controlled for. Making use of the demographic theory of social change with predictive power outlined above, the authors projected future vulnerability to natural disasters in different
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scenarios of future human capital. They found that even under the assumption of constant hazard, that is, disregarding the possibility of an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events caused by climate change, investment in universal secondary education offers a huge potential for saving lives. These were just a few examples of recent studies that have addressed the different levels of vulnerability in recently observed natural disasters. These specific patterns of vulnerability to disasters are likely to be similar to those arising from future climate change more broadly, and in particular from the projected higher incidence of extreme events.
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Outlook and conclusions As demographers we know that societies change over time in composition by age, sex, education, and other relevant characteristics. We also have a unique toolkit (multi-dimensional cohort component methods) to model and project these changing structures over several decades into the future with only small uncertainties. This predictive power based on the principle of ‘demographic metabolism’ (Ryder 1965; Lutz 2013), which results in slow and foreseeable gradual cohort replacement, distinguishes demographic models from most other models in the social sciences. If we know how many girls aged 15 today have completed primary education, we have a very good basis for estimating how many women aged 55 in 2050 will have at least primary education. The only errors come from future trends in mortality and migration—which should be considered as being education-specific—and from some late transitions to primary education. No other discipline offers better long-term projections of social structure than demography, and hence no other discipline is better equipped to make predictions about the significance of the projections for a population’s vulnerability and capacity to adapt to climate change. Furthermore, demographers have a long tradition of studying all kinds of differentials and, in particular, differential vulnerability to threats such as infant mortality, adult mortality, morbidity, and disability. On the positive side, we also study differentials in education and other factors of empowerment that enhance the adaptive capacity of individuals, households, and communities, as shown by the evidence presented above. Here, demographers can make a unique and crucial contribution to global discussion on climate change. We are better at studying differentials and making projections than any other social science—and we should use this strength to
help the world to assess what is likely to happen to future societies. Applying the demographic theory of social change with predictive power, we can help improve policies to mitigate GHG emissions and reduce vulnerability to climate change. A major step in this direction was the recent inclusion of population projections by age, sex, and educational attainment in the new set of global SSPs (KC and Lutz 2013; O’Neill et al., under review). These qualitative descriptions of broad patterns of development will serve as a common reference point for IPCC-related modelling by the global climate change community. The five different pathways represent different possible combinations of future socio-economic challenges both for mitigation and for adaptation. As depicted in Figure 2, whether the need to reduce GHGs will prevail over the need to cope with climate change, will depend on how evenly future development will be spread across societies. In a fragmented world the challenges both for mitigation and adaptation are maximized (scenario SSP3). In that case a large share of the population— particularly in the less developed world—will be left behind in a state of high vulnerability with very low or no education at all and excluded from the technological advancements that would lead to cleaner and more modern means of energy production. In a less fragmented world, both challenges are minimized along a sustainable development path (scenario SSP1). This scenario incorporates green development and high adaptive capacity, both driven by a rapid expansion in educational attainment levels. The remaining pathways refer to cases where either one of the two challenges dominate (SSP4, SSP5) or there is a balance between them (SSP2). All these five SSP scenarios have been operationalized for all countries in the world in terms of specific fertility, mortality, migration, and education
Socio-economic challenges for mitigation
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SSP 5:
SSP 3:
(Mit. challenges dominate)
(High challenges)
Conventional development
Fragmentation SSP 2:
(Intermediate challenges)
Middle of the road SSP 1: (Low challenges)
Sustainability
SSP 4: (Adapt. challenges dominate)
Inequality
Socio-economic challenges
Figure 2
The logic behind the SSPs
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Interaction of population and climate change trajectories corresponding to the general SSP narratives (KC and Lutz 2014). In this paper, we started with the suggestion that the social sciences can only benefit from seeing themselves more in terms of intervention sciences, that is, as a set of theory-and-data-based models able to produce conditional forecasts of major future population trends, comparable in nature with the conditional forecasts that the climate change research community produces in their Global Circulation Models. Only the combination of these natural science models with social science models that address future adaptive capacity will allow us to arrive at science-based insights concerning the dangers posed by climate change for human well-being under different possible future trajectories. Finally, the inertia of the human population system with regard to structural changes actually carries some good news for the future. We already know with rather high certainty that at the global level the population with at least secondary education will double by 2050, leading—with a somewhat lower degree of certainty—to the end of population growth before the end of the twenty-first century (Lutz and KC 2014). The further we go into the future, the greater will be the long-term effects of near-term education efforts in yielding lower fertility, lower mortality and disability, higher income growth, better chances of moving to green technologies, and higher capacity for adapting to climate change. A few years ago, in an editorial in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Lutz (2009b) summarized a long-term view of the world based on human capital under the title ‘Towards a world of 2– 6 billion of well-educated and therefore healthy and wealthy people’. Having reviewed the studies mentioned above, a few years later we could now add to this title: ‘… who would be empowered to move faster to sustainable energy consumption and adapt better to climate change that is already unavoidable’.
Note 1 Erich Striessnig and Wolfgang Lutz are at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU), Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria. E-mail: [email protected]. Funding for this work was made possible by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council ‘Forecasting Societies Adaptive Capacities to Climate Change’: Grant agreement ERC-2008-AdG 230195-FutureSoc and the ‘Wittgenstein Award’ of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Z171-G11.
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2 We thank Raya Muttarak for the summary of various studies related to human capital and vulnerability/ adaptive capacity.
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Demographic aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation a
Wolfgang Lutz & Erich Striessnig
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Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU) Published online: 26 Apr 2015.
Click for updates To cite this article: Wolfgang Lutz & Erich Striessnig (2015) Demographic aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation, Population Studies: A Journal of Demography, 69:sup1, S69-S76, DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2014.969929 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2014.969929
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Population Studies, 2015 Vol. 69, No. S1, S69–S76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2014.969929
Demographic aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation Wolfgang Lutz and Erich Striessnig
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Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU)
This paper addresses the contribution of changes in population size and structures to greenhouse gas emissions and to the capacity to adapt to climate change. The paper goes beyond the conventional focus on the changing composition by age and sex. It does so by addressing explicitly the changing composition of the population by level of educational attainment, taking into account new evidence about the effect of educational attainment in reducing significantly the vulnerability of populations to climatic challenges. This evidence, which has inspired a new generation of socio-economic climate change scenarios, is summarized. While the earlier IPCC-SRES (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) scenarios only included alternative trajectories for total population size (treating population essentially as a scaling parameter), the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) in the new scenarios were designed to capture the socio-economic challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and include full age, sex, and education details for all countries.
Keywords: education; demographic change; behavioural change; climate change; mitigation; adaptation
An intervention-science approach to population and climate change interactions The social sciences face great challenges in addressing effectively the issue of global environmental change. Much of our scientific work takes a rather specific disciplinary approach and only focuses on narrow aspects of this major interdisciplinary challenge. While much of our thinking about the world is compartmentalized, the real world that we try to understand and the future course of which we try to anticipate is highly interconnected. Its study calls for an analytical systems approach. In this context it has recently been suggested that it is useful to structure the broad range of all the social sciences and humanities into what have been labelled identity sciences and intervention sciences (Lutz 2012). While the former address the questions about who we are and where we are coming from, the notion of ‘intervention sciences’ refers to the study of where we are going and what actions (interventions) can influence the future course of events under certain conditions. At the individual level this refers to theories of human behaviour, at the societal level it calls for theories of socioeconomic change with predictive power (Lutz 2013). While the behaviour of people as individuals or as groups tends to be less deterministic than most © 2015 Population Investigation Committee
of the processes studied in the natural sciences, there is no reason not to propose models of social change in which the consequences of interventions for future outcomes are predicted within specified uncertainty ranges. This approach is exemplified by Lutz and KC (2011), who considered educational attainment as a relevant demographic characteristic in addition to age and sex. They showed, for several decades into the future, how interventions in the form of different levels of the expansion of education produce not only different distributions of educational attainment but also different total population sizes and levels of child mortality. This is because fertility and child mortality vary in consistent and predictable ways with the level of mother’s education. In times of accelerating social change around the world, understanding and modelling the systematic and predictable elements of social change are needed more than ever before. The challenges that societies face in the form of man-made climate change require interventions in the near term which are based not only on natural scientific evidence but also on scientific analyses of the social relations and structures which may enhance or reduce vulnerability to future climate conditions. Hardly any challenges in the twenty-first century are greater than those arising from the interaction of demographic
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change and climate change. Moreover, we know with near certainty that future global climatic conditions and the size and structure of global populations will be different from those observed today. To address climate change and changes in the socio-economic structures of the human population in scientific fashion, we need models with predictive power on both sides. And here we observe a major asymmetry. There are numerous ‘big science’ projects dealing with climate change in the natural sciences, involving highly sophisticated Global Circulation Models with thousands of scientists providing projections with uncertainty ranges of the response of temperature and precipitation to different concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, there is almost nothing comparable in scale and effort in the humanities and social sciences. Nonetheless, they have an equally important question to address, namely, to identify the likely future structures and capabilities of human populations that are available to cope with expected future climate conditions. Arising from this asymmetry, most estimates of the likely level of future human suffering induced by climate change—for instance, the estimates by the World Health Organization of additional malaria deaths in the highlands of Eastern Africa—assume that future climate conditions will affect societies that have remained at a stage in their socio-economic development and public health capabilities similar to those on the same territory today. Studying the interactions between two evolving systems by assuming that one (climate) changes significantly and the other (human population and development) is frozen at its current conditions is an untenable, if not absurd, approach to the study of this important issue. The reason for this unsatisfactory situation may lie in the fact that there are very few models that can provide alternative future scenarios of population and human development. However, even given this uncertainty, the persistence of present conditions is clearly not the best assumption. As demographers, we know with near certainty that the future population in, say, Eastern Africa will be larger, older, and probably better educated than it is today. Moreover, these changes, together with associated social and economic changes, will significantly influence the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of human societies in the second half of our century. In almost all countries the younger generations are on average better educated than the older ones, so the average education of the adult population in the future will improve. That is likely to improve economic growth and the governance of public health (Lutz 2014).
Different near-term interventions through education policies can lead to different long-term socioeconomic development pathways that matter both for the mitigation of climate change and adaptation to it. This will be discussed later in the paper in the context of the new Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) that have been developed in partnership with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Figure 1 represents graphically the complex relationship between population dynamics and the climate system. On the lower left side of the figure, we see the effects of changes in the human population on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the resulting climate change. While in early studies of this effect only the absolute size of the population was assumed to matter (Ehrlich and Holdren 1971), now there is growing recognition that people differ in important ways in their demographic characteristics in respect of human energy consumption and emissions (O’Neill et al. 2001). The Figure illustrates that the solutions to mitigation, that is, reductions in emissions, depend on technological advance and behavioural changes. This capacity for innovation will again depend on the demographic composition of the population and in particular on its level of education. However, the ability to cope with the consequences of climate change also varies greatly at the level of the individual, the household, and the community. Differential vulnerability according to demographic characteristics such as age, sex, place of residence, or level of education has to be taken into account when assessing the likely impacts of changing climate conditions on mortality, health, livelihood, or migration.
Demographic drivers of mitigation The classical I = PAT model, disaggregating humanity’s overall impact on the environment, still assumed that the effects of population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T) were separable. However, more recent analyses (MacKellar et al. 1995; O’Neill et al. 2001, 2010) show that future carbon emissions will be driven not just by population size but also by the distribution of the population by age, sex, education, place of residence, household size, and other relevant characteristics. Future societies, by any account, will be much older than present ones, they will be more urban, and they will be more educated. All of this affects lifestyles and consumption patterns, and also innovative potential: the ability to find solutions and to cope with unavoidable aspects of climate change. How many people
Interaction of population and climate change
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Regional effects on: – temperature – humidity – extreme events (storms) – sea-level rise
Global Climate Change
Differential vulnerability
Livelihood GHG emissions
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Consumption
Health/Mortality
Migration
Technology
Human Population
Innovation
By age, sex, level of education, place of residence, and household structure
Closing the full circle of population and climate change
No education Primary Secondary Tertiary
Figure 1 Closing the full circle of mitigation (on the left) and vulnerability and adaptation (on the right) of population and climate change interactions Source: Lutz 2009a. the Earth ultimately can support is not only a question of population size, it also depends on the capabilities of those people inhabiting it (Cohen 1995). A recent body of literature has suggested that in addition to the conventional demographic differentiation by age and sex, educational attainment should be included routinely as a third demographic dimension in all studies of population dynamics, thus introducing a dimension of ‘quality’. That dimension is highly relevant for understanding the interactions between population and climate change. While the importance of education as an empowering factor is clear and straightforward in the case of adaptation to climate change—as will be discussed in the following section—its role in mitigation is more complex. In the high-fertility contexts of much of the less developed world, the main impact of
education is through its effect on fertility. Mediated by a desire for smaller family sizes representing the move from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’ of children, education reduces population growth. However, education also typically enhances economic growth, makes people more affluent, and helps to bring people out of poverty (Lutz et al. 2008; Crespo et al. 2013). While this is a highly desirable outcome from a development perspective, reduced poverty also means—at least under current technological realities —higher consumption and thus more CO2 emissions. This makes some environmental activists, those concerned only with reducing emissions and not with reducing poverty, sceptical about the value of education in the context of mitigation. In order to avoid playing poverty eradication and increases in well-being against climate change
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mitigation, it is necessary to look at behavioural differences at given levels of income. Recent evidence from US households shows that better educated people tend to consume in more eco-friendly ways at any given level of income, particularly when it comes to spending on home energy and transportation by car. These are two of the most important sources of household-level atmospheric GHG production (Sharygin 2013). Thus, it can be argued that education will play a major role in mitigating the impact on CO2 emissions of otherwise desirable increases in incomes. That this is not only a Western phenomenon is shown by a study on fuel choices in urban Indian households (Farsi et al. 2007), where the level of education reveals a similar potential for mitigation. Illiterate household heads, or those with only primary education, are more likely to choose firewood or kerosene as a cooking fuel. However, households where the head has a higher level of education are more likely to use liquid petroleum gas (LPG), which has clear efficiency, health, and environmental benefits. For instance, households with illiterate heads are on average about 22 per cent more likely than those with a secondary school education (the base category) to use wood and about 34 per cent less likely to use LPG. In another study on the mitigation potential of lifestyles and related consumer choices by Pronello and Camusso (2011), the level of education and age are the only socio-economic and demographic characteristics that influence choices in favour of more environmentally friendly modes of transport. In a cluster analysis of the mobility patterns of travellers in an Italian city, they show that age and education distinguish clusters strongly, while sex, family size, and income are irrelevant indicators. Because it is mainly the young and better educated who show more sustainable behaviour as well as a more positive attitude to change, the authors recommend that education should be seen as an addition to traditional interventions for the management of the supply of transportation. An adequate educational policy addressed to mobility has to make use of the dynamics of ‘demographic metabolism’—the replacement of older generations by younger ones— and start with the young generations to achieve a social transformation in the long run. The demographic and behavioural factors discussed above in their very nature evolve only slowly and gradually. However, much more powerful nearterm forces of successful mitigation come from technological innovations that reduce fossil fuel consumption radically while maintaining or improving the standard of living. The associated notion of
‘green growth’ has become a powerful catchword in the context of the Rio+20 International Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. However, the technologies needed to justify such optimism do not yet exist and will not exist at an affordable cost in the near future. Hence, hope rests strongly on the future innovative potential of societies. While the appearance of specific innovations is impossible to predict, it is generally agreed that a high general level of education enlarges the pool of potential successful innovators and enhances the appreciation of science and research in society. Without that, democratic states will not make the investments in basic research which fosters such innovations.
Human capital and vulnerability/adaptability to climate change In recent years the response of the international community to climate change has moved gradually from an almost exclusive focus on mitigation to giving more attention to the need to prepare for adaptation to climate change that is already unavoidable. That went hand in hand with a growing recognition that in assessing people’s vulnerability, their demographic characteristics and capabilities are important as well as where they live. A recent international scientific panel on ‘Demography’s Role in Sustainable Development’ emphasized the need to: (i) Recognize that the numbers, characteristics, and behaviour of people are at the heart of sustainable development challenges and of their solutions. (ii) Identify subpopulations that contribute most to environmental degradation and those that are most vulnerable to its consequences. In poor countries especially, these subpopulations are readily identifiable according to age, gender, level of education, place of residence, and standard of living. (Lutz et al. 2012, p. 918)
This focus on differential vulnerability is a recent development in the research community dealing with natural disasters and adaptation, whose primary focus has been traditionally on location. However, the importance of demographic factors, in particular the changing educational composition of the population, in affecting the future impact of climate change on human survival and well-being has been the topic of a recent special issue of Ecology and Society (Butz et al. 2014). Several contributions find strong evidence, both at the micro-level and the macro-level, of the risk-reducing potential of education, which enables individuals to acquire knowledge, skills, and competencies that can
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Interaction of population and climate change influence their adaptive capacity and thus reduce risk. An individual-level study of preparedness for disaster during the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes among households located along the Andaman coast in Phang Nga province found that formal education —measured at individual, household, and community level—increased the likelihood of precautionary action being taken (Muttarak and Pothisiri 2013). While having been affected by the 2004 tsunami clearly increased preparedness for an emergency, education emerged as a relevant factor in anticipating risk and taking precautionary steps among persons without such disaster experience. Another study by Frankenberg et al. (2013), using longitudinal survey data collected in two provinces on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, examined the extent to which education protects individuals from natural disaster. They found that education clearly played a role in coping with the disaster over the longer term, with the better educated enjoying better psychosocial health 5 years after the tsunami. They were less likely than others to live under precarious living conditions and were better at compensating for loss of income following the tsunami. Similar evidence on the association between education and vulnerability has been reported at the community level. KC (2013) found that education level strongly mitigated damage from floods and landslides in terms of human lives lost, animals lost, and other damage to households using comprehensive village-level data for Nepal (a microsample of the 2001 census covering 2.5 million individuals together with disaster data for 2000–09). Comparing the effect of education with those of income and wealth, the author concludes that education has a stronger and more consistent effect in reducing damage. A comparative study by Wamsler et al. (2012) on two low-income settlements in Brazil and El Salvador, where climate-related disasters are recurrent, yields similar conclusions. The level of education was found to be negatively correlated with the level of exposure to risk. The effect arose directly and indirectly: directly by reducing existing risks through greater awareness and better understanding, and indirectly by protecting against poor health, organized crime, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, or informal settlement growth. In addition to that, they found evidence that education may be the key to another prime coping strategy in adapting to climate change, namely, migrating out of the affected high-risk area (Adqer and Adams 2013). Evidence on environmentally induced migration from
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Mali and Senegal strongly confirms this finding (van der Land and Hummel 2013). Another study by Garbero and Muttarak (2013) investigated the impacts of floods and droughts on community welfare in Thailand. Based on Thai government surveys of living conditions and life quality in 68,695 rural villages for 2009–11, the paper uses difference-in-difference methods to analyse how floods and droughts in 2010 affected consumption and income of the villages in 2011. It found that communities with higher average educational attainment, unlike others, did not experience a reduction in consumption, investment in agriculture, or a decline in income. A further analysis demonstrates that communities with high average levels of education are more able to secure government financial aid for areas affected by floods and droughts. Again building on the evidence from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a study by Muttarak et al. (2012) on 286 villages in Phang Nga province in Thailand that suffered the most severe losses, showed that preparation for extreme climate events and natural disasters are driven by past experience and anticipation of such events in the future. In addition, villages with a higher proportion of village members with at least secondary education are more likely to prepare for potential natural disasters. Similarly, Pichler and Striessnig (2013) used data from qualitative interviews conducted in Cuba and the Dominican Republic to compare these two island states with regard to disaster vulnerability. Even though they are fairly similar in their exposure to natural extreme events, the outcomes of disasters vary greatly between the two islands. While effective disaster response is strongly embedded in the minds of the entire Cuban population, which is one of the most educated in the less developed world, the lack of education and literacy in the Dominican Republic made its people more vulnerable and prevented them even from understanding warnings about forthcoming danger. Using national-level time series of disaster fatalities around the world, a study by Striessnig et al. (2013) found significant evidence for the role of education in reducing disaster fatalities. On the other hand, contrary to popular assumptions, there was no evidence for the role of income per head in reducing vulnerability once other key determinants of socio-economic development and exposure to risk had been controlled for. Making use of the demographic theory of social change with predictive power outlined above, the authors projected future vulnerability to natural disasters in different
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scenarios of future human capital. They found that even under the assumption of constant hazard, that is, disregarding the possibility of an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events caused by climate change, investment in universal secondary education offers a huge potential for saving lives. These were just a few examples of recent studies that have addressed the different levels of vulnerability in recently observed natural disasters. These specific patterns of vulnerability to disasters are likely to be similar to those arising from future climate change more broadly, and in particular from the projected higher incidence of extreme events.
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Outlook and conclusions As demographers we know that societies change over time in composition by age, sex, education, and other relevant characteristics. We also have a unique toolkit (multi-dimensional cohort component methods) to model and project these changing structures over several decades into the future with only small uncertainties. This predictive power based on the principle of ‘demographic metabolism’ (Ryder 1965; Lutz 2013), which results in slow and foreseeable gradual cohort replacement, distinguishes demographic models from most other models in the social sciences. If we know how many girls aged 15 today have completed primary education, we have a very good basis for estimating how many women aged 55 in 2050 will have at least primary education. The only errors come from future trends in mortality and migration—which should be considered as being education-specific—and from some late transitions to primary education. No other discipline offers better long-term projections of social structure than demography, and hence no other discipline is better equipped to make predictions about the significance of the projections for a population’s vulnerability and capacity to adapt to climate change. Furthermore, demographers have a long tradition of studying all kinds of differentials and, in particular, differential vulnerability to threats such as infant mortality, adult mortality, morbidity, and disability. On the positive side, we also study differentials in education and other factors of empowerment that enhance the adaptive capacity of individuals, households, and communities, as shown by the evidence presented above. Here, demographers can make a unique and crucial contribution to global discussion on climate change. We are better at studying differentials and making projections than any other social science—and we should use this strength to
help the world to assess what is likely to happen to future societies. Applying the demographic theory of social change with predictive power, we can help improve policies to mitigate GHG emissions and reduce vulnerability to climate change. A major step in this direction was the recent inclusion of population projections by age, sex, and educational attainment in the new set of global SSPs (KC and Lutz 2013; O’Neill et al., under review). These qualitative descriptions of broad patterns of development will serve as a common reference point for IPCC-related modelling by the global climate change community. The five different pathways represent different possible combinations of future socio-economic challenges both for mitigation and for adaptation. As depicted in Figure 2, whether the need to reduce GHGs will prevail over the need to cope with climate change, will depend on how evenly future development will be spread across societies. In a fragmented world the challenges both for mitigation and adaptation are maximized (scenario SSP3). In that case a large share of the population— particularly in the less developed world—will be left behind in a state of high vulnerability with very low or no education at all and excluded from the technological advancements that would lead to cleaner and more modern means of energy production. In a less fragmented world, both challenges are minimized along a sustainable development path (scenario SSP1). This scenario incorporates green development and high adaptive capacity, both driven by a rapid expansion in educational attainment levels. The remaining pathways refer to cases where either one of the two challenges dominate (SSP4, SSP5) or there is a balance between them (SSP2). All these five SSP scenarios have been operationalized for all countries in the world in terms of specific fertility, mortality, migration, and education
Socio-economic challenges for mitigation
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SSP 5:
SSP 3:
(Mit. challenges dominate)
(High challenges)
Conventional development
Fragmentation SSP 2:
(Intermediate challenges)
Middle of the road SSP 1: (Low challenges)
Sustainability
SSP 4: (Adapt. challenges dominate)
Inequality
Socio-economic challenges
Figure 2
The logic behind the SSPs
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Interaction of population and climate change trajectories corresponding to the general SSP narratives (KC and Lutz 2014). In this paper, we started with the suggestion that the social sciences can only benefit from seeing themselves more in terms of intervention sciences, that is, as a set of theory-and-data-based models able to produce conditional forecasts of major future population trends, comparable in nature with the conditional forecasts that the climate change research community produces in their Global Circulation Models. Only the combination of these natural science models with social science models that address future adaptive capacity will allow us to arrive at science-based insights concerning the dangers posed by climate change for human well-being under different possible future trajectories. Finally, the inertia of the human population system with regard to structural changes actually carries some good news for the future. We already know with rather high certainty that at the global level the population with at least secondary education will double by 2050, leading—with a somewhat lower degree of certainty—to the end of population growth before the end of the twenty-first century (Lutz and KC 2014). The further we go into the future, the greater will be the long-term effects of near-term education efforts in yielding lower fertility, lower mortality and disability, higher income growth, better chances of moving to green technologies, and higher capacity for adapting to climate change. A few years ago, in an editorial in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Lutz (2009b) summarized a long-term view of the world based on human capital under the title ‘Towards a world of 2– 6 billion of well-educated and therefore healthy and wealthy people’. Having reviewed the studies mentioned above, a few years later we could now add to this title: ‘… who would be empowered to move faster to sustainable energy consumption and adapt better to climate change that is already unavoidable’.
Note 1 Erich Striessnig and Wolfgang Lutz are at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU), Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria. E-mail: [email protected]. Funding for this work was made possible by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council ‘Forecasting Societies Adaptive Capacities to Climate Change’: Grant agreement ERC-2008-AdG 230195-FutureSoc and the ‘Wittgenstein Award’ of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Z171-G11.
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2 We thank Raya Muttarak for the summary of various studies related to human capital and vulnerability/ adaptive capacity.
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