What's New

The annual Geography 2050 meeting, held in partnership with the Columbia University Climate School is a multi-year, strategic dialog about the vital trends that will reshape the geography of our planet in the coming decades.  The themes for this year’s symposium include food origins; food sovereignty and food security; agriculture and climate change; investments; and geospatial technology.

Information for registration and details about sponsorship opportunities coming soon, see https://www.geography2050.org/

For this special issue of Population and Environment, we seek a range of empirical, theoretical and review papers from multiple social science disciplines, including but not limited to demography, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and public health. Topics may explore the complex interactions between environmental change, food security and a wide range of population outcomes such as health, fertility, mortality, migration, urbanization, educational attainment, and labor market performance. Papers may also offer projections of food security and related impacts under future population and climate change scenarios. We are also interested in papers that approach the topic from a different angle, including the role of population dynamics and food production systems as drivers of environmental change in the present and in the future. Theoretical or review papers providing comprehensive and critical discussions of the nexus population-environment-food are highly welcome. We consider contributions at any geographic scale and locations.

Submission Deadline: July 31, 2022. Please submit questions prior to this deadline to Raya Muttarak (muttarak@iiasa.ac.at) or Anna Dimitrova (adimitrova@ucsd.edu), the Guest Editors of this Special Issue, or Elizabeth Fussell (Elizabeth_Fussell@brown.edu), Editor-in-Chief.

https://www.springer.com/journal/11111/updates/19250858

The focus of the special issue is on “Population, Food and the Environment”, and the Guest Editors are Raya Muttarak and Anna Dimitrova

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 seeks to “[e]nd hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that the global population affected by severe food insecurity increased to 750 million in 2019. This negative trend is likely to continue given the rise in poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and temperature extremes induced by climate change adversely impact agricultural production. These events can directly affect livelihoods and food security through a reduction in food availability or indirectly through a reduction in agricultural income, increased unemployment, higher food prices, or violent conflict. The potential impact of environmental change on food production, distribution and access can have multiple ‘knock-on’ effects in other areas of human life, including health, migration, urbanization, and overall socio-economic development. Childhood malnutrition, for instance, which is closely linked with food insecurity, has long lasting impacts on health and wellbeing, ranging from physical and mental health, to cognitive development and labor market performance. Food insecurity can also influence population dynamics: fertility (e.g., through affecting maternal and fetal health), mortality (e.g., through increasing health risks), and migration (e.g., through disruptions of livelihoods or conflict). Given nations’ unequal vulnerability and capacity to respond and adapt to climate change, the impacts mentioned above will vary across geographies and population subgroups. Population, food and the environment are therefore closely connected.

For this special issue, the editors seek a range of empirical, theoretical and review papers from multiple social science disciplines, including but not limited to demography, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and public health. Topics may explore the complex interactions between environmental change, food security and a wide range of population outcomes such as health, fertility, mortality, migration, urbanization, educational attainment, and labor market performance. Papers may also offer projections of food security and related impacts under future population and climate change scenarios. We are also interested in papers that approach the topic from a different angle, including the role of population dynamics and food production systems as drivers of environmental change in the present and in the future. Theoretical or review papers providing comprehensive and critical discussions of the nexus population-environment-food are highly welcome. The Editors consider contributions at any geographic scale and locations.

The deadline for submission is 30 July 2022.

Please contact Raya Muttarak (muttarak@iiasa.ac.at) or Anna Dimitrova (adimitrova@ucsd.edu) if you have any queries about the Special Issue.