Effects Of Population Decline Research Articles

The triple burden of depopulation in Ukraine: examining perceptions of population decline

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to severe population loss as millions exited the country and casualties mounted. However, population decline in Ukraine had been occurring for decades due to the triple burden of depopulation: low fertility, high mortality and substantial emigration. Ukraine had also already experienced years of armed conflict and large-scale displacement after the Russian-backed separatist movement, which started in 2014. This study investigates perspectives on depopulation using online focus groups conducted in July 2021, seven months before the current invasion. We compared discussions in eastern Ukraine, including in rural villages, the IDP-receiving city of Mariupol, the large city of Kharkiv and occupied Donetsk. Participants observed that cities were growing at the expense of rural areas. The situation in Donetsk was bleak due to mass emigration, but some participants pointed to a recent increase in births. Overall, the participants acknowledged the triple burden of depopulation in Ukraine, and the consequences of population decline, such as a shrinking labour force and rapid ageing.

Depopulation or population decline? Demographic nightmares and imaginaries

Scientists are well aware of the major social, economic and cultural challenges brought about by population decline. However, we can often underestimate the more extreme interpretations of both the causes and the consequences of population decline in the popular discourse. In this commentary, I explore some of these toxic narratives, and speculate about how they may be linked to what appears to be a prevailing populist/ethno-nationalist view of population grounded in political tropes, rather than in scientific reality. Using Armitage’s (2021) concept of “demographic imaginaries”, I argue that much of this public discourse serves several vital purposes: to try to simplify a complex issue; to try to “unify”; to try to blame and scapegoat; and, ultimately, to try to negate the obligation to make tough, complex political and policy decisions. I also argue that scientists working in the field of population decline need to be more aware of these tropes, and should make more active efforts to ground the discourse of population decline in science and reality. I conclude that a bottom-up approach to responding to population decline may be the most fruitful avenue for progress in the future.

Population decline: Towards a rational, scientific research agenda

While the global population continues to rise, many regions are experiencing population decline due to low fertility, outmigration or, most often, a combination of the two trends – and many more are forecast to do so in the future. Economic and demographic theories have so far been unable to offer an unambiguous prediction regarding the consequences of population decline. The 2023 volume of the Vienna Yearbook, “The causes and consequences of depopulation”, provides a wide variety of perspectives on population decline, illustrating that it is a highly multifaceted issue, and that there are no simple theoretical or empirical applications for understanding its causes and consequences, or the potential responses to it. The Debate contributions provide a broader viewof and reflections on population decline, while also highlighting the benefits and opportunities associated with it, and ways to manage population changes globally. In contrast, the research articles tend to focus on the challenges of shrinking population that are experienced at a local level. This Introduction gives an overview of the contributions in this volume and the different perspectives they offer.

Planning to grow, planning to rock on – infrastructure management and development in shrinking municipalities

ABSTRACT Previous work on shrinking cities has mainly addressed shrinkage and its effects in large and former industrial cities and not as much in municipalities in rural areas. In this paper, we focus on infrastructure challenges, responsibilities, and growth strategies in Swedish municipalities. We argue that there is a tension between the responsibilities connected to the municipal operations and infrastructure challenges posed by being a shrinking municipality on the one hand, and the ways the municipalities are planning for growth on the other hand. The municipalities are all struggling with the effects of population decline, leading to economic strains in all areas, including infrastructure management and development, but investments in infrastructure are many times directed towards the establishment of specific industries such as the tourism or mining industry with the belief of attracting new inhabitants, visitors, firms and industry. In addition, many of the municipalities lack the capacity and jurisdiction needed to manage the infrastructure development in some areas such as fibre optics, district heating, and electricity grids. Also, in some municipalities, the populations are spread over large geographical areas but must still provide infrastructure services to all inhabitants.

Contextualizing small towns – trends of demographic spatial development in Germany 1961–2018

ABSTRACT For the past ten years, the growth debate has been urban-centric, at least in Germany, while rural areas have been largely associated with depopulation. Despite their importance, small towns fall into a systematic perception gap in scientific and planning discourses. Against this background, this paper applies a threefold conceptualization of scalar relations paying analytical attention to (1) population trajectories, (2) the relation of spatial proximity and development, and (3) the influence of international migration on population development. Covering the period 1961–2018, this paper shows that despite a current demographic respite due to increased international migration, many small towns will continue to face the long-term consequences of population decline. This is accompanied by an increasing spatial differentiation of population growth rates. The relation between proximity to large centres and population growth is weakening, giving rise to other factors, e.g. residential amenities and competition between small and medium-sized towns. Based on this quantitative assessment, we conclude that small towns are the most dynamic settlement type in Germany and, at the same time, extremely heterogeneous in terms of trajectories and underlying driving factors. We also discuss conceptual aspects regarding process-understanding, terms, categories, and tools to analytically grasp the complexity of small towns.

Urban shrinkage in the periphery of a post-communist country: the story of Šiauliai

ABSTRACT Lithuania is a post-communist country that has experienced a rapid population decline. This study examines one of the largest cities in Lithuania, Šiauliai, regarding urban shrinkage in the post-communist context, explicating Šiauliai’s shrinkage based on an adapted heuristic model as proposed by European scholars. It presents a case study and highlights the main drivers of population loss in the city, which include political and economic changes, out-migration, and negative natural change. It also examines the direct and indirect consequences of population decline in the development of the city, including brownfields, unemployment, and an aging population.

Rural facility decline: A longitudinal accessibility analysis questioning the focus of Dutch depopulation-policy

In the debate about rural depopulation it is frequently assumed that population decline goes hand-in-hand with the decline of facilities and services. Hence, spatial policy for rural areas often focuses on the provision of key services of general interest in areas experiencing population decline. However, the actual changes in distribution and accessibility of several services are almost never evaluated longitudinally, and most recent studies focus on measuring access in terms of supply and demand using aggregated data. This paper offers an alternative method, from an equality standpoint, and investigates changes in access and distribution of local facilities for basic needs (food, education and health care) in Fryslân (Netherlands). By doing so, it questions the focus of Dutch spatial policy on depopulating areas. Changes in access to primary schools, general practitioners and supermarkets between 2000 and 2012 are visualised by overlapping network analyses in GIS. The results are discussed in the context of depopulation and the decline of local facilities from smaller towns and villages. This paper concludes that due to the initial high density of basic facilities the accessibility remained quite good. Moreover, major changes in access do not coincide with the areas targeted by the government to deal with effects of population decline. This suggests that spatial policy for facility-decline should focus on people with low mobility in small villages throughout Fryslân, rather than depopulating areas. This research shows the importance of questioning the assumptions behind spatial policy for service-provision, and offers a simple method to do so.

Loss of cultural song diversity and the convergence of songs in a declining Hawaiian forest bird community.

The effects of population decline on culturally transmitted behaviours in animals have rarely been described, but may have major implications to population viability. Learned vocal signals in birds are of critical importance to behaviours associated with reproduction, intrasexual interactions and group cohesion, and the complexity of vocal signals such as song can serve as an honest signal of an individual's quality as well as the viability of a population. In this study, we examined how rapid population declines recently experienced by Hawaiian honeycreepers on the island of Kaua‘i (USA) may have influenced the diversity, complexity and similarity of learned honeycreeper songs. We analysed the acoustic characteristics of songs recorded during three time periods over a 40-year time frame for three species of declining Kaua‘i honeycreepers. We detected a loss of song complexity and diversity over the 40-year time period that paralleled dramatic population declines. Concurrent with the loss of complexity, we also found that the acoustic characteristics of the three honeycreepers' songs became more similar to one another. To our knowledge, this is the first documentation of convergence of acoustic characteristics among rapidly declining species. The reduction in song complexity and diversity and convergence of songs not only signals a loss of culturally transmitted behaviours in these endemic Hawaiian honeycreepers, but also potential challenges to the recovery of these rapidly declining species. Moreover, the present study highlights that there is a ‘hidden’ cost to declining populations beyond just the loss of individuals that is not often considered, the loss of culturally transmitted social behaviours.

Dimensions of shrinkage: Evaluating the socio-economic consequences of population decline in two medium-sized cities in Europe, using the SULD decision support tool

All over Europe, it is a known fact that cities are shrinking. One of the main causes is population decline, but the consequent reduction of urban area is neither immediate nor easy to foresee spatially. Questions arise such as where do cities start to ‘shrink’ first? What are the most fragile areas that face the risk of becoming derelict? What are the most vulnerable social groups? And how does this affect real estate values across the city? Existing models for projecting the effects of shrinkage have been criticized for lacking spatial-explicitness, being excessively data-dependent, and failing to incorporate various socio-economic, urban and environmental aspects in the assessment of attractiveness of urban areas and of decisions by households. In this article, we attempt to overcome this criticism by applying the spatially-explicit Sustainable Urbanizing Landscape Development decision support tool (SULD), based on hedonic pricing theory, in two cities in southern Europe (Aveiro, Portugal and Imperia, Italy). SULD is used to project, assess and compare changes in land-use, household type distribution, real estate values and household densities, in three different scenarios of population decline (−5%, −10% and −15%). Results quantify the amount of contraction of urban area, housing quantity and living space; highlight the most problematic areas; and uncover low income households as the least affected, whereas the relocation of high income households may cause gentrification of medium income households in some areas of the historical city centre.

The self-reinforcing effects of population decline: An analysis of differences in moving behaviour between rural neighbourhoods with declining and stable populations

The consequences of population decline are present at different geographical scales and are often believed to be self-reinforcing. This means that population decline possibly causes changes in the living environment, which brings about more population decline. This research analysed if population decline at the neighbourhood level has an effect on the probability to move out or within rural neighbourhoods in North-Netherlands. It was expected that a preceding decline of the population in the neighbourhood increased the probability to move out of the neighbourhood, but that this effect differed for categories of the population and for moves over short and long distance. Using register data and additional surveys for 2006, a multinomial logistic regression model was constructed to estimate the effects of a preceding decline of neighbourhood populations on the probability to move over short and long distances for different categories of the population. It was found that a preceding decline of the neighbourhood population increased the probability to move out of the neighbourhood. However, this effect was only found for moves out of the neighbourhood up to 10 km of especially young adults, couples with children, and people aged 65 to 75. Moreover, by calculating estimated probabilities of moving out of neighbourhoods with declining and stable populations, it was shown that the difference between actual numbers of people moving out of these two types of neighbourhoods, was small and could therefore take a long time to have serious impact on the neighbourhood population.

Local Government Budgets Stressed by Population Decline? – An Analysis of Residual Costs for the Local Communities of Styria in Austria

This article looks into the effects of population decline on local public expenditure. It starts with a theoretical explanation of so-called residual costs, i.e. cost curves of shrinking communities lying above those of growing. Data at the community level of the state Styria (Austria) on expenditure categories which have natural monopoly characteristics from 1997-2007 provides empirical support that expenditure per capita grew significantly stronger in shrinking communities than in growing communities. These results provide evidence that at least some of the public expenditures cannot be adjusted to the population decline in the medium term.
 
 Keywords: residual costs • local public expenditure • population decline • infrastructure • Austria • fiscal federalism

Population decline and the new nature: Towards experimental “refactoring” in landscape development of post-industrial regions

From an everyday perspective, a consequence of population decline and de-industrialization is the growth of natural areas: less industry and less people means more nature in the future. In the real word, the situation is more complicated. Using the development of a new lake district as a successor of brown coal industry and strip mining in the southern parts of the city of Leipzig (Germany) as a touchstone, this paper will explore some of the challenges and future opportunities for the design of ‘new nature’ in post-industrial landscapes. To discuss how fields such as ecology and engineering can fulfill their role as innovative players in times of population decline, two seemingly contrasting strategies for making decisions under conditions of depopulation in landscape development—called here scientific non-knowledge—are introduced: refactoring and public experiments.

Effective size, census size, and genetic monitoring of the endangered razorback sucker, Xyrauchen texanus

For the past several decades the Lake Mohave population of the federally endangered razorback sucker, Xyrauchen texanus, has had no natural recruitment because of intensive predation on larvae by non-native fishes. In response to impending extirpation, a repatriation program was implemented where larval razorbacks are collected from the wild following natural spawning, reared in protective custody, and then repatriated at a much larger size. In this study, we estimated annual (Nbf) and generational female effective size (Nef) of the spawning stock by characterizing temporal genetic changes in mtDNA among larval cohorts, and then compared these estimates to the estimated number of reproductively capable (adult) females in Lake Mohave (Nf). Razorback suckers have life history and mortality schedules that could yield values of Nef/Nf as low as 10−5 due to match–mismatch recruitment (or the “Hedgecock effect”) that increases variance in reproductive success. Average Nbf was estimated to be 160, Nef was 706, and the ratio Nef/Nf was 0.29 and 0.38 for arithmetic and harmonic mean Nf, respectively. Our findings indicate that (i) larval sampling in Lake Mohave sufficiently encompasses temporal and spatial variation within annual larval cohorts as to be representative of the spawning stock, (ii) roughly 3–16% (about 8% on average) of adult females contribute genetically to larval cohorts each year, and (iii) repatriated fishes appear to be contributing genetically to larval cohorts. Simultaneous genetic and demographic monitoring offers insights that neither approach can provide alone into effects of population decline and management practices in this species.

Ageing populations and childhood infections: the potential impact on epidemic patterns and morbidity.

Population decline, arising from below replacement fertility and possibly giving rise to substantial changes in age distribution, is a feature of many industrialized developed countries; Italy is one of the most notable European examples. The potential influence of this phenomenon on prevalence of chronic non-infectious disease is well known, but little attention to date has been paid to the impact on severe disease due to childhood infections in those cases where control is insufficient to achieve elimination. A transmission dynamics model incorporating realistic demography is used to investigate the possible impact of population decline and ageing and suboptimal vaccination uptake on the age distribution of incidence of measles infection and of consequent mortality. Data from Italy is used to parameterize the model. Population ageing in the absence of vaccination is shown to reduce per capita incidence of infection but also to increase average and upper quartile ages at infection. The effect is substantially enhanced by significantly suboptimal vaccination uptake, when disease-induced mortality has, for a period, the potential to exceed that in the absence of vaccination. Although a substantially increased burden from chronic non-infectious disease has frequently been proposed as a consequence of population decline, there is also potential for an increase in morbidity and mortality from measles and other childhood infectious diseases, particularly where vaccine uptake is substantially below the optimum. Rubella is highlighted as a particular cause for concern. This work also has implications for less-developed countries.

Identification of domestic cattle hybrids in wild cattle and bison species: a general approach using mtDNA markers and the parametric bootstrap

Many species are currently undergoing reductions in population size due to widespread habitat loss and expanding human activities. Because interspecific hybridization is often a consequence of population decline and fragmentation, identification of individuals or populations with hybrid ancestry is an increasingly important issue in conservation biology. In many wild cattle and bison species, the problem of natural hybridization has been compounded by indiscriminate crossbreeding with domestic cattle for the purpose of improving domesticated stocks. Therefore, a genetic test using the polymerase chain reaction was developed so that wild cattle and bison with domestic cattle mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes could be rapidly identified. Using this genetic test, domestic cattle mtDNA haplotypes were detected in Bos grunniens (yak), Bison bonasus (European bison), and 6 out of the 15 (40%) Bison bison (North American bison) populations tested. In total, 30 out of the 572 (5.2%) North American bison tested, were found to have domestic cattle mtDNA. The hybrid origin of these mtDNA haplotypes was verified in a phylogenetic analysis using the parametric bootstrap. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the conservation status and future management of wild cattle and bison species.

Identification of domestic cattle hybrids in wild cattle and bison species: a general approach using mtDNA markers and the parametric bootstrap

AbstractMany species are currently undergoing reductions in population size due to widespread habitat loss and expanding human activities. Because interspecific hybridization is often a consequence of population decline and fragmentation, identification of individuals or populations with hybrid ancestry is an increasingly important issue in conservation biology. In many wild cattle and bison species, the problem of natural hybridization has been compounded by indiscriminate crossbreeding with domestic cattle for the purpose of improving domesticated stocks. Therefore, a genetic test using the polymerase chain reaction was developed so that wild cattle and bison with domestic cattle mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes could be rapidly identified. Using this genetic test, domestic cattle mtDNA haplotypes were detected in Bos grunniens (yak), Bison bonasus (European bison), and 6 out of the 15 (40%) Bison bison (North American bison) populations tested. In total, 30 out of the 572 (5.2%) North American bison tested, were found to have domestic cattle mtDNA. The hybrid origin of these mtDNA haplotypes was verified in a phylogenetic analysis using the parametric bootstrap. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the conservation status and future management of wild cattle and bison species.

Economic and demographic consequences of population decline: Colonsay and Jura, 1841–91

Population decline is the dominant trend in the recent history of the Scottish High­ lands and Islands, with emigration its most obvious component.! The decisions of inhabitants to leave their homes, whether voluntary or forced, have produced a remarkable number of literary and historical accounts. The human biologist as population geneticist, though, would see emigration as just one part of the multicomponent system that is human adaptation. Population decline and emigration can be interpreted as unfavourable ecological responses with concomitant structural changes in the remaining population.2 From this perspective, what are some of the interrelated, often subtle effects of population decline in residual populations of the Scottish Highlands and Islands? And, in turn, what might these examples reveal about traditional human populations at ecological stress? The populations studied here are the 1841—91 communities of the islands of Colonsay and Jura in the southern Inner Hebrides. They are the objects of an on­ going research project in genetic demography which includes studies of both the contemporary and historical populations.^ The demographic data for the 1841—91 populations come from the birth, death, marriage and census registers kept at the Office of the Registrar-General for Scotland, New Register House, Edinburgh.