Archive for: Journal Article


The interactions between human population dynamics and the environment have often been viewed mechanistically. This review elucidates the complexities and contextual specificities of population environment relationships in a number of domains. It explores the ways in which demographers and other social scientists have sought to understand the relationships among a full range of population dynamics (e.g., population size, growth, density, age and sex composition, migration, urbanization, vital rates) and environmental changes. It then briefly reviews a number of the theories for understanding population and the environment and provides a state-of-the-art review of studies that have examined population dynamics and their relationship to five environmental issue areas. The review concludes by relating population-environment research to emerging work on human-environment systems.

Year: 2007

Source: Annual Review of Environment and Resources

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    People are part of both the problem of climate change and the solution. The challenge is to quantify that statement. This article reviews some of what has been learned so far. In addition to numbers of people, population includes demographic attributes like age, sex, education, health, and familial status; demographic processes like birth, death, migration, the formation of unions and families, and their dissolution; and the spatial distribution of people by geographic regions and size of settlements, from rural to urban. This paper reviews what demographers expect of the human population from now to 2050, then describes how people collectively affect climate and how climate affects the human population. The focus is on the available quantitative information, its implications, and its limitations. Finally, the paper offers some recommendations for action.

    Year: 2010

    Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society

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      Population, health, and environment (PHE) programs link conservation, health, and family planning interventions. These programs are generally located in biodiversity hotspots, where population pressure may contribute to environmental degradation. This review describes the general structure of PHE programs and provides examples to highlight various aspects of this approach. It focuses on a case study from the Integrating Population and Health into Forestry Management Agendas program in Nepal that addressed deforestation from fuel-wood harvesting, indoor air pollution from wood fires, acute respiratory infections related to smoke inhalation, as well as family planning in communities in Nepal’s densely populated forest corridors. Keys to the success of the project included empowerment of community forest user groups with PHE program know-how and appropriate technology. Lessons learned highlight the critical role that nongovernmental organizations can play to catalyze cross-sectoral responses to complex development issues. The PHE approach can be effective for achieving sustainable development and meeting conservation and health objectives.

      Year: 2011

      Source: Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine

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        In this commentary, the authors explain how family planning can accelerate progress across the 5 SDG themes of People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership and why it is critical to achieving the goals and the post-2015 development agenda. Empowering women to choose the number, timing, and spacing of their pregnancies is not only a matter of health and human rights but also touches on many multisectoral determinants vital to sustainable development, including women’s education and status in society. Without universal access to family planning and reproductive health, the impact and effectiveness of other interventions will be less, will cost more, and will take longer to achieve. Global strategies and partnerships—and health decision makers at all levels—must leverage the abundance of available research, evidence, and the range of justifications presented here to prioritize family planning as a foundational component of health, rights, and long-term development strategies.

        Year: 2016

        Source: Global Health: Science and Practice

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          In rural Ethiopia, environmental degradation and a shortage of arable land impose a major toll on the population. Population, health, and environment (PHE) programs, such as that of the Ethio-Wetlands and Natural Resources Association (EWNRA), have evolved to address these issues. This article examines the community-based distribution (CBD) of family planning commodities in rural Ethiopia through EWNRA’s large, multisectoral PHE program. Participants indicated that the integrated program encouraged acceptance of family planning and reduced geographic barriers to access. Through peer education and collaboration across government ministries, EWNRA leveraged integrated population–environment messages to garner support for its network of CBD providers. These integration strategies are a model for PHE programs worldwide, especially amid the global response to climate change. Because of the complex nature of PHE organizations, researchers often find it difficult to effectively document and evaluate their programs. With this in mind, the article proposes a framework to assess PHE integration.

          Year: 2015

          Source: Studies in Family Planning

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            This study presents Blue Ventures’ experiences incorporating sexual and reproductive health services within a pre-existing community-based marine conservation initiative in Madagascar as part of an integrated population, health and environment (PHE) programme. The findings emphasize the mutually beneficial synergies, supporting both public health and conservation objectives, which can be created by integrating sexual and reproductive health services into more conventional biodiversity conservation activities. This PHE approach demonstrates the inextricable link between reproductive health and resource use by providing practical, immediate and lasting benefits to public health, gender equity, food security and biodiversity conservation.

            Year: 2012

            Source: Oryx—The International Journal of Conservation

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              Although the potential advantages of linked population and environment programs are increasingly acknowledged, evidence is still limited regarding the feasibility and acceptability of PHE initiatives. In some of the best known PHE models, such as those implemented in the Philippines and Madagascar, health promotion was added to environmental initiatives through the intervention of community health workers. Less is known about the ability of environmental workers to assume a direct role in health promotion. To help fill this evidence gap, the Program Research for Strengthening Services (PROGRESS) project, which was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve access to family planning services, teamed with the Green Belt Movement (GBM), a Kenyan nongovernmental organization dedicated to environmental conservation and community development. PROGRESS and GBM conducted a mixed-methods study to examine the following issues: (1) whether GBM’s frontline environmental outreach workers, known as Green Volunteers, could lead family planning promotion activities and (2) how communities would react to Green Volunteers’ promoting potentially sensitive messages about contraception. We used process monitoring and post-intervention data collection to assess the feasibility and acceptability of Green Volunteers’ implementing a PHE intervention and to explore the potential of this approach for expanding access to family planning information and services. In addition, we examined the costs of the intervention to evaluate affordability.

              Year: 2015

              Source: International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health

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                This study assessed changes in contraceptive use and fertility between 2009 and 2013 in the Velondriake locally managed marine area of southwest Madagascar where marine conservation organization Blue Ventures began implementing an integrated health-environment program in 2007. The proportion of sexually active women aged 15 to 49 years using hormonal contraception and/or condoms during last intercourse increased more than twofold from 25 percent in 2009 to 59 percent in 2013. The number of births in the last 12 months per 1,000 women of reproductive age declined by 28 percent over the same period from 196 in 2009 to 141 in 2013. This program increased access to family planning for previously under-served communities, leading to uptake of modern contraceptives with an associated decline in fertility. These results suggest that this program has enabled couples to avoid unintended pregnancies, thereby bolstering local marine conservation initiatives.

                Year: 2017

                Source: Studies in Family Planning

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                  This peer-reviewed journal article on the value added of PHE approaches describes a quasi-experimental design used by the IPOPCORM project in the Philippines to test the hypothesis that there will be a significant improvement in both coastal resource management (CRM) and human reproductive health (RH) outcomes by delivering these services in an integrated manner as opposed to delivering either in isolation. The CRM, RH and integrated CRM+RH interventions were tested in three island municipalities of Palawan. Pre-project (2001) and post-project (2007) measurements of dependent variables were gathered via biophysical and community household surveys. The results support the project’s central hypothesis that integrated coastal resource management and family planning delivered simultaneously and with community involvement generate greater impact than stand alone interventions.

                  Year: 2010

                  Source: Environmental Conservation

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                    The environmental consequences of increasing human population size are dynamic and nonlinear, not passive and linear. The role of feedbacks, thresholds, and synergies in the interaction of population size and the environment are reviewed here, with examples drawn from climate change, acid deposition, land use, soil degradation, and other global and regional environmental issues. The widely assumed notion that environmental degradation grows in proportion to population size, assuming fixed per capita consumption and fixed modes of production, is shown to be overly optimistic. In particular, feedbacks, thresholds, and synergies generally amplify risk, causing degradation to grow disproportionally faster than growth in population size.

                    Year: 2017

                    Source: Population and Environment

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