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Research on the population-environment nexus has often focused on the deleterious effects of humans on the environment, such as increased population growth and density effects on land degradation, carbon emissions, and air quality. More recent research has shown how climate change is now, in turn, affecting populations through adaptive mechanisms like climate migration and reduced fertility. These pathways of effects may alter the age distribution of populations and then fuel a feedback mechanism that alters environmental conditions, even perhaps climate-mitigating ones. Thus, Curran and coauthors investigate an inverse idea – whether population age composition can produce positive scenarios for environmental betterment, namely forest restoration across low- and middle-income countries. They use globally-gridded, sub-national, population age composition, and high-resolution satellite imagery of tree cover to analyze the relationship between age composition and subsequent tree cover expansion across 3 panels of data. They hypothesize that sub-national areas that exhibit population aging will be associated with subsequent tree-cover expansion. They also expect that the hypothesized patterns might systematically vary by demographic and ecological regimes and they evaluate those possibilities by stratifying our analyses accordingly. Their approach uses a fixed effects model that includes a number of robustness tests to confirm findings to evaluate the strength of evidence supporting our hypothesis.

Sara R. Curran is a professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Professor of Sociology, and Director at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and she has a joint appointment in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington.

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