Population Age-Structure and Forest Growth in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries

Courtney Allen, University Of Washington
Susana Beatriz Adamo, CIESIN-Columbia University
Kaichao Chang, University of Maryland
Sara Curran, University of Washington, Seattle
John Fay, Duke University
Jeff Vincent, Duke University
Yi Wang, ETH Zurich

In 2011, the Bonn Challenge set to restore 350 million hectares (Mha) of forest by 2030. The research between population processes and forest growth is underdeveloped. Research on the human population-environment nexus has examined population as both a precondition and an outcome but has largely cast population as a variable of few dimensions. We aim to further this research by drawing attention to a rich and well-known population indicator that has been oft overlooked in environmental research: age structure. Age structure of a population is the final outcome and the engine of the fertility, mortality, and migration patterns of current, recent, and past regimes. This study explores the understudied relationship between population processes and forest growth, by utilizing global, gridded data to describe demographic and forest-related variables in 8,033 subdivisions in 139 low-and-middle-income countries during 5-year intervals in the time period 2005-2015. Our preliminary results show that older populations (those with a larger share of people >=65 than the global average share) have a positive effect on tree-cover gain over the subsequent five years. This suggests that aging populations are associated with an “environmental demographic dividend” in the case of tree-cover gain.

Keywords: Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Population Ageing, International Migration

See extended abstract.