Population and Strategies for National Sustainable Development

The guide serves as a resource for national-level policy makers and the staff of conservation organizations who wish to integrate population and environmental conditions in planning for sustainable development. It presents the basic rationale for linking population and environmental issues, including the demonstrable impact that growth in population and consumption is having on the environment. At the same time, it acknowledges the difficulty of achieving integration due to long-entrenched disciplinary and institutional specialization. The guide refrains from making blanket prescriptions, but rather emphasizes that policy and planning responses must be attuned to the location-specific nature of population-environment interactions. A number of mechanisms for achieving integration are presented, including placement of demographers within national planning organizations, or creation of country-based networks of population and conservation professionals who meet regularly to share knowledge and experience. For those less familiar with previous research, the book includes a primer on demographic change and models and frameworks for understanding the links between population dynamics (births, deaths, growth, migration) and environmental change.