Recent public policy debates on the potential impacts of climate change have paid little attention to the dynamics of population, including the ways in which dense settlement patterns pose increased risks of environmental catastrophe, and how these disasters are managed by different cultures and nations.

An ARC supported project on Integrating Population Perspectives in Asian Environmental Debates seeks to explore the principles of population adaptation through the lens of demographic dynamics and structures. The principal investigators are Professor Terence Hull, Professor Zhongwei Zhao, and Dr Adrian Hayes, who are working with a team of collaborators across Asia, including Professor Gavin Jones, Dr Kim Streatfield, Dr Budi Haryanto, and Dr Yu Zhu.

The three year project has already hosted three symposia, in Dhaka, Fujian and Jakarta, each with a focus on a different aspect of population change. The Dhaka meeting considered issues of poverty and adaptation, taking a case study of seven villages that were swept away in severe riverine flooding in Matlab, Bangladesh in 1987-88. In Fujian the participants of the symposium considered the ways in which data collection and analysis can assist in defining the priorities and organization of adaptive responses to changing thermal conditions. The Jakarta meeting reviewed issues of air, water and land pollution, and took the opportunity to observe some of the efforts made by the Indonesian government to make this megacity more liveable. The project will finish in early 2013.

Photo: Eroded river bank.