Population environment

Global food and nutrition insecurity continues to be a serious problem, threatening the livelihoods of millions of poor people, with sub-Saharan Africa worst affected. A total of 842 million people in 2011–13, were estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger, regularly not getting enough food to conduct an active life. Food and nutrition insecurity has traditionally been looked at as a problem of rural areas. Accordingly much of the policy issues have been targeting rural populations. However, increasingly research findings are showing that urban populations can also be highly affected. Food and nutrition insecurity accompanied by climate change and rapid urban growth poses a serious challenge to many livelihoods. This leads urban dwellers to engage in farming activities to help satisfy their food needs. The percentage of urban residents in sub-Sahara Africa is expected to rise from 30 to 47 percent of the total population until 2030, further increasing urban food demand. Urban ag...

This study presents and empirically tests a simple model of attitudinal and personality influences on individual willingness to take action in support of the environment (agentic disposition) in a sample of 367 residents of Fairfax County in Virginia. The model, comprised of items from Schwartz's theory of norm activated altruism and an abridged version of Levenson's three-dimensional conception of locus of control, fits the data well. Results of the study indicate that 1) locus of control is best viewed as multidimensional rather than previous unidimensional conceptualizations, 2) each of the Levenson locus of control dimensions plays a unique role in the model of environmental agentic disposition, and 3) agentic disposition can be conceptualized as a type of norm activated altruism. The role of agentic disposition in legitimating the positions taken by social movement organizations is discussed.

The second law of thermodynamics has played an important role in ecological economics as providing a justification for the view that economies have limits to growth. Yet beyond basic textbooks statements of this law, we seldom find informed philosophical examinations of the meaning and metaphysical justification for the second law. In this paper we shall examine some challenges which have

This article presents three cross-cutting intervention case studies that address HIV, AIDS, and natural resources management in an integrated manner through innovative programming in Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Malawi. In Zimbabwe, a religious-based non-governmental group and two community organizations work together to build skills of HIV- and AIDS-vulnerable children in rural areas to meet dietary and income needs, while using natural resources sustainably. In Uganda, various government agencies and NGO actors work together to improve the food security of HIV-affected households at the national, district, sub-district, and village levels. Finally, in Malawi, a conservation organization incorporates HIV and AIDS awareness and programming into its operations and projects. Each case study presents pioneering approaches to simultaneously addressing the pressures on conservation initiatives, food security/agricultural production, income generation/livelihoods, and social and health care systems. They also provide lessons for expanding interventions and partnerships.

A simple theoretical model describing the interaction between humans and their environment in terms of energy flows is proposed to check the compatibility between the density of energy throughput in human society and the density of energy throughput in the ecosystem. This model is then applied to analyze three different scenarios of energy interaction between human society and the ecosystem:

In this paper we present several concepts related to integrated analysis of societal metabolism across scales. First we introduce the concept of “dynamic energy budget” of human societies, which is based on the distinction between exosomatic and endosomatic energy flows and the possibility of establishing autocatalytic loops (egg-chicken patterns) among them. Second, we discuss the nature of the dramatic changes that the industrial revolution induced on the characteristics of societal metabolism. Finally, we discuss methodological problems related to the representation of complex adaptive systems. Dealing with sustainability of human societies requires the parallel use of non-equivalent descriptive domains. This, in turn, requires the ability of “scaling up and down” when moving across levels handling parallel non-reducible assessments.

In this paper we present several concepts related to integrated analysis of societal metabolism across scales. First we introduce the concept of “dynamic energy bud-get” of human societies, which is based on the distinction between exosomatic and endosomatic energy ...

This study contributes to our understanding of the association between internal migration patterns and environmentally hazardous facilities, with a focus upon race-specific outmigration at the county-level, nationwide. Among research suggesting inequalities with regard to the social distribution of environmental risk, selective migration is often implied to be a key dynamic leading to differential exposure to proximate environmental hazards. Nonetheless, the

Significant advances have been made to understand the interrelationship between humans and the environment in recent years, yet research has not produced useful localized estimates that link population forecasts to environmental change. Coarse, static population estimates that have little information on projected growth or spatial variability mask substantial impacts of environmental change on especially vulnerable populations. We estimate that 20 million people in the United States will be affected by sea-level rise by 2030 in selected regions that represent a range of sociodemographic characteristics and corresponding risks of vulnerability. Our results show that the impact of sea-level rise extends beyond the directly impacted counties due to migration networks that link inland and coastal areas and their populations. Substantial rates of population growth and migration are serious considerations for developing mitigation, adaptation, and planning strategies, and for future research on the social, demographic, and political dimensions of climate change.