Collection

Population, Food and the Environment

Submission status
Closed

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 seeks to “[e]nd hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that the global population affected by severe food insecurity increased to 750 million in 2019. This negative trend is likely to continue given the rise in poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and temperature extremes induced by climate change adversely impact agricultural production. These events can directly affect livelihoods and food security through a reduction in food availability or indirectly through a reduction in agricultural income, increased unemployment, higher food prices, or violent conflict. The potential impact of environmental change on food production, distribution and access can have multiple ‘knock-on’ effects in other areas of human life, including health, migration, urbanization, and overall socio-economic development. Childhood malnutrition, for instance, which is closely linked with food insecurity, has long lasting impacts on health and wellbeing, ranging from physical and mental health, to cognitive development and labor market performance. Food insecurity can also influence population dynamics: fertility (e.g., through affecting maternal and fetal health), mortality (e.g., through increasing health risks), and migration (e.g., through disruptions of livelihoods or conflict). Given nations’ unequal vulnerability and capacity to respond and adapt to climate change, the impacts mentioned above will vary across geographies and population subgroups. Population, food and the environment are therefore closely connected.

This special issue explores a range of empirical, theoretical and review papers from multiple social science disciplines, including but not limited to demography, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and public health. Topics explore the complex interactions between environmental change, food security and a wide range of population outcomes such as health, fertility, mortality, migration, urbanization, educational attainment, and labor market performance. Papers also offer projections of food security and related impacts under future population and climate change scenarios. We also included papers that approach the topic from a different angle, including the role of population dynamics and food production systems as drivers of environmental change in the present and in the future. Theoretical or review papers providing comprehensive and critical discussions of the nexus population-environment-food are also included.

Editors

  • Raya Muttarak Raya Muttarak  &

    Raya Muttarak

    Raya Muttarak is the former IIASA Population and Just Societies (POPJUS) Program director and acting Migration and Sustainable Development (MIG) Research Group leader. She is currently professor of Demography and the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy but still maintains close ties with the Population and Just Societies Program at IIASA. She has also been director of Population, Environment, and Sustainable Development at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, since 2017.

  • Anna Dimitrova Anna Dimitrova

    Anna Dimitrova

    I am a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Diego. I hold a PhD in economic and social sciences from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. My research focuses on the impacts of climate and environmental change on human health and wellbeing, I study a wide range of issues related to child nutrition, infectious diseases, maternal health, and migration, among other topics, and my work focuses on populations in low- and middle-income countries. A central goal of my work is to better understand the determinants of human vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and the factors that enhance adaptive capacity.

Articles (13 in this collection)