Research Themes & Research Plan 2006-2010

Abstract
Introduction
Background
Strategic Goal and Objectives
Implementation Plan

Abstract

The World Population (POP) Program has established leadership in the fields of methods of population forecasting and the analysis of population-environment interactions. IIASA is thus the only global change research institute with significant in-house population expertise. In 2006–2010 this role will be strengthened and expanded with the application of innovative methods to individual countries and sub-national populations.

The Program’s research over 2006–2010 will cover three main themes:

(1) population forecasting;
(2) the analysis of population characteristics and human capital; and
(3) population and environment.

Research within the forecasting theme will focus on the demographic dynamics of global population aging, addressing the uncertainty of future trends in old age mortality and the resulting structure of the elderly populations around the word. Work on the demography of human capital formation will apply IIASA’s multi-state projection methods to forecast populations by level of education around the world. The third theme will be developed through new comprehensive population-development-environment case studies with a specific focus on coastal regions. In particular, IIASA will take the lead in conducting such studies for those regions that were most severely hit by the December 2004 Asian tsunami. POP also remains active in contributing to global populationenvironment discussions.

Introduction

Population trends are crucial determinants of economic, social and environmental change. It is quite simply impossible to consider global change in a serious manner without reference to demographic trends. However, because populations tend to change relatively slowly, demography is often taken for granted and its impact under-appreciated. Rather like some slow geological process that is imperceptible in the short-run, demographic change often has an ineluctable force, and ends up changing the whole landscape. As the historian Fernand Braudel (1972) put it: “Everything, both in the short term and at the level of local events as well as on the grand scale of world affairs, is bound up with the numbers and fluctuations of the mass of the people.” IIASA’s World Population Program (POP) plays a key role in advancing the scientific understanding of demographic trends and forecasting future developments.

The underlying purpose of the demographic research carried out within the program is to understand the determinants and consequences of future population trends. The main thrust of the program’s work falls under three inter-related themes: population forecasting, the nature of change in population characteristics and human capital, and the interaction of population and environment. In each case, there are fundamental research questions to address.

Population forecasting: What is the best way to project future populations? Where do the assumptions that underlie forecasts come from and how can the plausibility of alternative assumptions be assessed? How should we incorporate uncertainty into our projections and how can we translate alternative hypotheses into subjective probability density functions?

Population characteristics and human capital: What are the most important sources of observable heterogeneity to be considered explicitly in population analysis and forecasting? How do we add indicators of ‘quality’ to conventional demographic projections of the ‘quantity’ of the population? How do we advance the methods used for making population projections that are heterogeneous with respect to education, place of residence, or other important attributes? How does the level of educational attainment influence fertility, mortality and migration?

Population and environment: What are the main effects of population on the natural environment and vice versa? How do we come to grips with this immensely complex issue? What are the most appropriate scientific methods that we can apply? Can the tools of dynamic systems analysis be applied to such complex issues? What determines a population’s vulnerability to environmental change and can human capital projections be taken as an indicator of empowerment and socio-economic resilience?

In answering these questions, IIASA is unique in at least three ways. No other institute concerned with global environmental change has in-house expertise in population comparable with IIASA’s. And within the demographic community, no other research center has so long and so substantial a commitment to research on population and environment. Moreover, IIASA is the only independent scientific entity concerned with studying and forecasting the global population. The only other groups carrying out this work are the United Nations, the World Bank, and the US Census Bureau. None of these deals with the issue of uncertainty in a consistent manner and none of them addresses explicitly sources of heterogeneity in demographic trends other than age and sex.

IIASA’s unique role in the field is well indicated by the number and quality of its international collaborators and by the fact that key international institutions increasingly prefer IIASA’s methodologies for dealing with the forecasting of population characteristics. For example, UNESCO recently decided to abandon its previous approaches to literacy forecasting and adopt IIASA’s multi-state methodology. It appears likely that the method will soon be adopted by the World Bank. In terms of academic research institutions IIASA is at the core of an extensive network of population researchers around the world. The Program has strong existing links in Europe (particularly with the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the only research center with an explicit focus on European demography) and Asia (IIASA is a founding partner in the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis). POP is also developing regional collaborations in Africa, Latin America, the United States and the Middle East. This network of associated research institutions is expected to play an invaluable role in the Program’s work over the period 2006–2010, especially with regard to the preparation and dissemination of IIASA’s population forecasts. The network of contacts will help to design the region-specific assumptions underlying the projections, and ensure the widespread use of new forecasting methods developed here.

Finally, at the conceptual level POP is at the forefront of developing a whole new way of thinking about the future that has the potential to change significantly both the social sciences and the study of the human dimensions of environmental change. This new approach may be called “population-based analysis and forecasting”. This term does not imply that population changes (in terms of changing size and age structure) are at the heart of all the other changes, although indeed population size and structure do matter for a broad array of social, economic and environmental changes. The term is meant to connote a much broader concept in the understanding of all characteristics that vary between individuals yet have some stability over time. For all these characteristics multi-state population forecasting is a highly promising analytical tool with which to assess and forecast change. Forecasts by level of education are a good example of this; trends in self-identity are another. Currently the Program is working on applying the methods to studying changes in European identity over time, based on the observed fact that young people in most EU member countries feel more European than older cohorts. There is almost no limit to the behavioral and attitudinal questions to which this populationbased approach can be applied. As such, it can significantly add valuable new tools to the conventional toolkit of the social sciences.

Background

In order to anticipate the future, we have to understand the present and the past. To know where we are heading, we must know where we are and how we got here. When demographers try to make sense of the complexities of the world around us, they use one of social science’s great generalizing models: the demographic transition. In association with many other aspects of modernization, every population in the world has experienced or is still undergoing a set of inter-connected changes that is termed the demographic transition. As Paul Demeny (1972) has succinctly put it: “In traditional societies, fertility and mortality are high. In modern societies, fertility and mortality are low. In between there is the demographic transition.” As a description of long-run trends, the demographic transition can be seen to be a universally applicable generalization. At some point in the past, every population had high fertility (mostly between four and six children per woman) and high mortality (life expectancy varied between 20 and 40 years). With the spread of modern medicine and public health, mortality has improved; as family planning and contraceptive use became the norm, fertility has fallen. Usually mortality fell first, with a delay before fertility decline. This difference in timing leads to substantial population growth before the two processes come back into balance. The process of transition began in the later 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and the neo-Europes overseas; it became a global phenomenon after World War II. Today, more than half the world’s people live in places where fertility is at or below the level needed for long-run inter-generational replacement (about 2.1 children per woman). Similarly, global life expectancy is approaching 70 years. Taken together, these changes amount to the most significant demographic transformation in human history.

As a consequence of the demographic transition, the 20th century was a century of unprecedented population growth – the global population grew almost fourfold, from 1.6 to 6.1 billion. However, while significant future growth is certain, the end of the demographic transition is now in sight. As an article by POP researchers in Nature in 2001 showed, it is likely that human population growth will come to an end over the course of the 21st century (Lutz et al., 2001). IIASA’s projections envisage a maximum population of around 9 billion being reached around the middle of this century. In contrast with the growth of the 20th century, the 21st will be a century of population aging. All populations that have long life expectancy and low long-run rates of population growth will experience aging. This will soon apply to all parts of the globe. Assessing the implications of this ineluctable transformation of the human age structure is a fundamental task for population science. How can we create societies that are economically and environmentally sustainable in the context of substantial aging? In carrying out this task it will be essential to consider not just quantity but also quality, i.e., not only how many people there will be, but how well endowed they are with human capital. Moreover, where the population will live will also play a key role in determining their income and lifestyles, and hence their impact on the environment. In these regards, decomposing future population according to urban-rural residence and level of educational attainment is a crucial advance on current forecasting practice.

Strategic Goal and Objectives

The strategic goal for the World Population Program for the next five years can be stated simply: to maintain and strengthen its position of global leadership in its fields of special expertise: population forecasting, the study of human capital and population characteristics and the interplay of the human population and the environment.

The main research objectives of the POP Program are thus to analyze and forecast the dynamics of global population change and its interactions with changing social, economic and environmental conditions. Special emphasis will be put on quantitative assessments of uncertainty and on capturing population heterogeneity that goes beyond age and sex to distinguish level of education and place of residence.

Over the planning horizon this strategic goal will be operationalized through three major projects, each falling within one of the three overall themes. In each major project the goal is to spearhead international research activities in that field. In addition to the major project, supplementary projects, mostly funded externally, will be carried out to advance specific topics.

Within the population forecasting theme research the major project will be on the dynamics of global population aging (probabilistic forecasts). Here the strategic goal is to position the Program as the leading institute producing projections of the elderly population for most countries of the world that accurately reflect the scientific state of the art (including the significant uncertainty) with respect to future changes in mortality and in particular old age mortality.

In the Program’s second major theme, the major project will be the demography of human capital formation. In this work, the strategic goal is to establish IIASA as the leading (possibly the only) institution that produces such forecasts for most countries in the world. Given the high priority the international community attaches to education in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (although population is not explicitly mentioned), a quasi-monopoly on education forecasting would help greatly to enhance IIASA’s position in the international community.

In the population and environment theme the major project will investigate population-development-environment (PDE) interactions. The strategic goal here is to advance this approach and have it recognized as the most comprehensive and most informative way in which to assess quantitatively the complex interactions between demographic and environmental change. A specific focus will be the study of the coastal areas affected by the Asian tsunami.

These three goals have been chosen for the coming five years because in meeting them the research can generate strong synergies; advances in one of the major projects can help address the challenges in others. For example, the multi-state projections by level of education will constitute an important element of PDE case studies. Moreover, this research agenda will enable the Program to draw on its established expertise while also exploring new scientific challenges.

Implementation Plan of the 3 Research Projects

The main thrust of the Program’s research will be organized into three major projects, one for each of POP’s key themes. The three projects described in detail below, therefore, will form the core of the Program’s research efforts over the coming years. As explained in each major project’s section, the full implementation of these projects will require external funding, and there is good reason to believe that such funds will be found in due course. However, the work has been planned so that the projects will make important scientific contributions, whatever the level of outside funding. In addition to the three major projects it is very likely that the Program will be involved in carrying out several shorter and smaller projects on related topics within each research theme, most or all of which will be funded externally. Since it is unrealistic to anticipate the exact nature of these smaller projects, this plan focuses on the projects that will be based on the Program’s core budget. For each of the three main projects, the description below provides both scientific discussion and practical organizational information. There is already considerable certainty about the work to be carried out over the first 18 months or so (2006– 2007), and thus the plans can be regarded as reasonably hard for that period. For the later years of the current plan (2008–2010) matters are inevitably somewhat sketchier. However, the way in which the major projects are to be organized already gives a clearer idea of work of the POP Program in the later stages of the current five-year plan than is feasible for some other IIASA programs. This is especially true for POP’s work on population projections, which runs on a recurring five-year schedule. Previous rounds of forecasts were made in 1996 and 2001, with a new set due to appear in 2006, and preparatory work already envisaged for the 2011 projections. In each case, however, the particular focus of the projection effort changes in order that the research can make the best possible scientific contribution when it appears. The rest of this section deals with each of the major projects in turn.

Project 1: The Dynamics of Global Population Aging

Project 2: The Demography of Human Capital Formation

Project 3: Studies of Dynamic Population-Development-Environment (PDE) Interactions

[Click on the title to receive detailed information]

Networking and Collaboration

The POP Program will continue to function as the world’s only group primarily dedicated to the scientific analysis of global population dynamics. This unique focus gives us an important role in the global scholarly community. The Program will aim to continue to combine innovative work at the highest scientific standards (publishing in leading journals) with relevance to other research programs at IIASA and to the global policy community. For some time now the Program has acted as an important node in a global network of researchers, with the POPNET newsletter being distributed to 3,000 scholars around the world.

In order to meet this ambitious aspiration with the limited resources available from IIASA’s core funds, POP is developing an extensive global network of regional collaborators. These are leading population centers around the world that function as scientific nodes for regional activities. In this respect, close scientific collaboration has been established with the following regional population research groups: the Vienna Institute of Demography, focusing on European comparative population analysis (of which POP leader Wolfgang Lutz is the director, a combination that helps to build a critical mass of demographers in the Vienna area); the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis (of which Wolfgang Lutz has been the initiator and serves as co-Principal Investigator); and the African Population and Health Research Center (where Wolfgang Lutz is deputy chair of the board of directors and chair of the scientific program committee). Discussions are currently underway to establish a partnership for North America with the population centers at Harvard and Princeton for global aging and human capital analysis, and with the Population Reference Bureau (where Wolfgang Lutz is on the board of directors). For Latin America POP is developing a relationship with CEDEPLAR in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, with one of their senior scientists currently visiting IIASA for a year.

Over the period 2006–2010 one important role for these regional demographic partners will be to participate in the substantive discussion and contribute specific regional knowledge in the process of defining the assumptions for IIASA’s population projections. The regional centers will also provide a means for the Program’s state of the art methods to become better known and more widely used. POP will also collaborate closely with a range of international organizations, including UNU, UNESCO, the World Bank, the UN Population Division, the European Commission, and UNFPA.

Within IIASA, POP serves as the center of expertise for all kinds of population and human capital-related dimensions of IIASA’s work, with special emphasis on population changes as drivers of global environment change and on the vulnerability or resilience of human populations to environmental change.

A further advantage of POP’s networking in Asia has become apparent since the tragic tsunami of December 26, 2004. Acting in collaboration with its partners in the Asian MetaCentre, especially Chulalongkorn University, IIASA has been in the forefront of efforts to establish a new research program to focus on population and sustainable coastal development. IIASA is thus helping to bring the world’s best research to address the problems of long-term development in vulnerable coastal areas. The effort builds on research carried out by POP and other scholars between 1995 and 2000 into exactly this topic. The earlier research, including papers on coastal development in both Thailand and Indonesia, was published in a special issue of Ambio in 2002 (Curran et al., 2002).

To facilitate carrying out the PDE case studies for the regions affected by the Asian tsunami, a particularly close relationship has been established with the College of Population Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. If sufficient funds become available this will include the establishment of a research station on population and environment in coastal regions in Phang Nga (Thailand). To provide a formal basis for this collaboration, the president of Chulalongkorn University and the director of IIASA recently signed an agreement for scientific collaboration in this field.

Responsible for this page: Suchitra Subramanian
Last updated: 05 Sep 2011