Wolfgang Lutz at the IIASA Conference

MEDIA

Framing Presentation entitled "Human resources for Sustainable Development: Population, Education and Health" of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lutz at the IIASA 40th Anniversary Conference

Both the Rio 1992 and Rio+20 Declarations stress that human beings are at the center of concern for sustainable development. People matter as carriers of rights and needs, as the ones who help meet these needs, and as the agents of change toward sustainability. But not all individuals have the same capabilities for doing so. They differ by age, gender, level of education, health status, and other characteristics that matter. Hence the conventional analysis and projection of populations by only age and sex are not good enough. We must also explicitly model other relevant characteristics. As an important first step in this direction, IIASA’s World Population Program has over the last decade applied the methods of multi-dimensional mathematical demography (which were developed at IIASA during the 1970s) to reconstructing and projecting the changing population distributions by age, gender, and level of highest educational attainment for all countries in the world for the period 1970-2100. The reconstructed data have already been used for new assessments of the benefits of education for outcomes ranging from economic growth to health, and from quality of governance to reducing vulnerability to natural disasters. The first use of the projections, based on the input of over 600 international experts, is as the foundation for the “human core” of the new SSPs (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways), for which IIASA is supplying the population scenarios. In my remarks I will present early results of this major effort to produce the most comprehensive and most broadly expert-based population and human capital projections so far available for all countries. A few selected new and surprising insights will be highlighted.