Abstract
In seeking to understand how future societies will be affected by climate change we cannot simply assume they will be identical to those of today, because climate and societies are both dynamic. Here we propose that the concept of demographic metabolism and the associated methods of multi-dimensional population projections provide an effective analytical toolbox to forecast important aspects of societal change that affect adaptive capacity. We present an example of how the changing educational composition of future populations can influence societies' adaptive capacity. Multi-dimensional population projections form the human core of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways scenarios, and knowledge and analytical tools from demography have great value in assessing the likely implications of climate change on future human well-being.
Highlights
Assessing the likely impacts of climate change on future human well-being requires a combination of two kinds of forecasts: how the climate of the future will be different from that of today; and how humans and there societies in the future will differ in terms of numbers, regional distributions, age structures and, most importantly, their capacities to successfully adapt to changing climatic conditions
We present a new approach for modelling and forecasting socioeconomic change for decades into the future based on the changing composition of populations by relevant characteristics that matter for future adaptive capacity both at individual and societal levels
Despite the theoretical argument and solid empirical evidence showing that ensuring universal education can potentially be a powerful measure for reducing “dangerous” impacts of climate change on human life, health and basic subsistence, in practice public and internationally driven adaptation efforts have been concentrating on hard structural adaptation measures[96,97]
Summary
We present a new approach for modelling and forecasting socioeconomic change for decades into the future based on the changing composition of populations by relevant characteristics (for example, age, gender, level of education, and other stable individual characteristics) that matter for future adaptive capacity both at individual and societal levels. Most extant studies on human loss from climate hazards commonly consider either only GDP55–57 or a composite indicator such as Human Development Index[61] When the latter is decomposed into its three elements (income, education and health)[62], the results show that countries with higher level of education on average did experience lower disaster mortality while income did not play a significant role[60]. With the focus of this review on “dangerous” climate change, given the consistent evidence on the protective role of education in reducing disaster vulnerability 69, we can conclude that better educated societies are more resilient and hold greater adaptive capacity to climate change This insight is relevant when deciding what qualities/characteristics of populations shall be forecasted when assessing future adaptive capacities in the context of global socioeconomic scenarios used in the analysis of climate change. Because these qualities go far beyond the mere consideration of population size – as has been done in earlier work based on the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES)90 – the new Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) approach has the populations fully stratified by age, gender and level of education
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