Attending to history in climate change–demography research

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Climate change is among the most urgent challenges of our time. While often considered a problem for the natural and physical sciences, the humanities and social sciences have made equally important interventions into research on the reciprocal relationship between humans and our climate. Because demography occupies the intersection of the natural and social sciences, and because it deals specifically with rates of change in social and natural processes, we believe it can make valuable contributions to the pressing imperatives of understanding and addressing climate change and mitigating the harms it is already visiting on the world’s most vulnerable people. We also believe that climate change may afford demographers an opportunity to expand our capacity to think about time and space at finer scales, and to examine the relationships among the core demographic processes – mortality, fertility and migration – which have typically been considered in isolation from one another. Yet responsibly leveraging climate change to advance demography, and leveraging demography to advance climate science and policy, require a cognizance of history that will assist demographers and those who use our analyses in avoiding the replication of past harms and, we hope, the invention of new ones. Understanding the history of demography and of population-environment thought more broadly can help us challenge assumptions that have not served science or policy well in the past – such as the assumption that larger or faster-growing populations necessarily put more pressure on the environment, independent of structural conditions – and consider alternative theoretical framings that might lead to better scientific models and policy solutions.