Demography of Coastal Populations

Definition

Demography of coastal human populations attempts to quantify the current and future number of residents living within 100 km of the shore country by country, and region by region.

Introduction

To most observers who live along a coast it seems clear that the resident human population is growing rapidly, but how fast is population growing? Will future growth be concentrated in the coastal zone ? Do such demographics portend well for sustainable development ?

To answer these questions we have combined the recent work of Burke et al. (2001), who reported the fraction of a country’s population living within 100 km of the coast, with United Nations (2017) population figures to calculate the 2020 and 2035 coastal populations for 129 countries. Burke et al. relied on the work of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN, see reference in Burke et al.) at Columbia University, to obtain the coastal population fraction. In our work, we did not attempt to...