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MEDIA CENTER New Book Announcement: Population and Environment:
NEW YORK (16 March 2002) — There can be no doubt that population changes and environmental changes influence one another. According to the editors of a new book published by the Population Council, the population-environment interaction warrants a new interdisciplinary field of studies, what they call P-E analysis. The book, published as a supplement to the quarterly journal Population and Development Review, represents the first systematic collection of P-E methodologies and includes eight essays by demographers, social scientists, and environmental scientists. By presenting key approaches that have proven useful in P-E analysis, editors Wolfgang Lutz, Alexia Prskawetz, and Warren C. Sanderson seek to develop appropriate analytical methods that make it possible to compare one study to another and eventually obtain more general insights on the population-environment interaction. "It seems very strange to think of the human population and the natural environment as two independent autonomous systems," the editors say. "One cannot draw a line about nature and see the human population as outside this line. Nothing is independent of the environment, including the human species, which is part of nature and in all basic life-supporting functions depends on the environment. Rather than viewing population-environment linkages in terms of a linear causal chain of separate boxes, it should be visualized as a series of concentric circles where the inner circles are fully embedded in the broader ones." The book is based on the premise that P-E analysis is an emerging and distinct field of scientific investigation. Specifically, P-E analysis fulfills at least two of the three criteria that in combination justify calling a certain body of research studies a distinct field: (a) a critical mass of people that work on these issues, (b) a set of joint research questions, and (c) a set of common methodologies. According to the editors, P-E analysis easily meets the first two criteria. As for the third: "The range of methods applied for addressing the P-E research question is still heterogeneous. There is no standard methodology that defines the field and there probably will not be a broadly accepted standard in the near future. This volume is the first attempt to systematically address the issue of methods in P-E analysis. We hope it will contribute to greater clarity and compatibility of future P-E studies." Wolfgang Lutz is Leader of the Population Project at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria and Director of the Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna; Alexia Prskawetz is Head of the Research Group on Population, Economy, and Environment at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; and Warren C. Sanderson is Professor in the Departments of Economics and History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. To order the book, contact Debra Warn (dwarn@popcouncil.org), 212-339-0514, or visit the Population Council Web site at http://www.popcouncil.org/publications/pdr/pdrsupps.html
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