Author
Listed:
- Emily Klancher Merchant
- Kathryn Grace
Abstract
Climate change is among the most urgent challenges of our time. While often considered a problem for the natural and physical sciences, the humanities and social scien-ces have made equally important interventions into research on the reciprocal relationship between humans and our climate. Because demography occupies the intersection of the natural and social sciences, and because it deals specifically with rates of change in social and natural processes, we believe it can make valuable contributions to the pressing impe-ratives of understanding and addressing climate change and mitigating the harms it is already visiting on the world’s most vulnerable people. We also believe that climate change may afford demographers an opportunity to expand our capacity to think about time and space at finer scales, and to examine the relationships among the core demographic pro-cesses – mortality, fertility and migration – which have typically been considered in isola-tion from one another. Yet responsibly leveraging climate change to advance demography, and leveraging demography to advance climate science and policy, require a cognizance of history that will assist demographers and those who use our analyses in avoiding the repli-cation of past harms and, we hope, the invention of new ones. Understanding the history of demography and of population-environment thought more broadly can help us challenge assumptions that have not served science or policy well in the past – such as the assumption that larger or faster-growing populations necessarily put more pressure on the environment, independent of structural conditions – and consider alternative theoretical framings that might lead to better scientific models and policy solutions.
Suggested Citation
Emily Klancher Merchant & Kathryn Grace, 2024.
"Attending to history in climate change–demography research,"
Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, vol. 22(1), pages 1-1.
Handle:
RePEc:vid:yearbk:v:22:y:2024:i:1:oid:0x003f5bcf
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:vid:yearbk:v:22:y:2024:i:1:oid:0x003f5bcf. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bernhard Rengs (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.