Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes Studies from India, China, and the United States (2001) / Chapter Skim
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1. Introduction to the Tri-Academy Project
1. Introduction to the Tri-Academy Project
Pages 11-22
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From page 11... ...
, but only in the last decades of the twentieth century did some of the developing regions begin to realize significant declines in fertility. The population momentum resulting from a youthful age structure, however, ensures that the populations of the developing world will continue to grow for many years.
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From page 12... ...
The regions are: in India, Kerala, a state in southwest India, and Haryana, a state north of New Delhi; in China, the Pearl River Delta in the south and the litai Basin in liangxi Province just to the north; and in the United States, South Florida in the southeastern part of the country and the Chicago region in the American Midwest. Study teams in each region analyzed basic trends in population growth and land use change since World War II and sought to identify drivers of the observed changes.
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From page 13... ...
Over the course of four days of discussion, scientists from all continents prepared a joint statement intended for use at the United Nations Population Conference scheduled for Cairo in tune 1994.~ The statement read in part: Throughout history, and especially during the twentieth century, environmental degradation has primarily been a product of our efforts to secure improved standards of food, clothing, shelter, comfort, and recreation for growing numbers of people. The magnitude of the threat to the ecosystem is linked to human population size and resource use per person.
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From page 14... ...
National Research Council provided support for the undertaking. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES As noted, the research objectives of the Tri-Academy Project are to explore the relations among population growth, consumption patterns, and land use change in the six study regions and to compare the findings in a way that will illuminate the principal driving forces of the observed changes.
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From page 15... ...
categories vis-a-vis changing population densities and distributions and consumption patterns. In exploring the third question and examining other forces causing change, researchers take into account the roles of government policies and economic integration and globalization.
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From page 16... ...
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From page 17... ...
The Jitai Basin, a center of revolutionary political activity in the 1940s and 1950s, has been considered a less-developed region of China for most of this century (see Chapter 8~. Beginning in the 1950s, this agricultural region was heavily affected by radical government policies, including the Great Leap Forward, which called for cutting down forests to provide fuel for local small-scale smelters; the "grain production first" system, which dedicated more farmland to grain production; the Cultural Revolution, a political movement designed to completely remold society and change the thinking of the Chinese people; and the "household responsibility" system, which temporarily shifted the responsibility for management of farmland and forests from public to individual households.
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From page 18... ...
In China, the litai Basin in liangxi Province and portions of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province are defined as geographical entities that followed land use development histories different from those of the rest of their respective provinces. Data for the larger provinces and the smaller counties and metropolitan districts are presented for comparison with those of the study regions.
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From page 19... ...
But each country respects its own land classification scheme and holds to special definitions. In the absence of comparable and unchanging spatial units and definitions, the numerical size of a population within political boundaries of varying scales produces uncertain measures of migration or population density.
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From page 20... ...
, participants in this study found no single one adequate to characterize the transformations occurring in the study regions. Because differentiation between the internal and external forces driving change within each region appears to be significant, a purely descriptive figure was formulated to capture the relationships among the several important variables in the study.
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From page 21... ...
Government policies local, regional, and national were found to be important in all study regions, but the national government dominates in nearly all the cases, presently and historically. In the United States, land regulation is primarily determined at the state and local levels.
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From page 22... ...
Chapter 2 on population compares the characteristics of population growth in the study areas with worldwide trends and relates them to current theoretical models. Chapter 3 describes the land use patterns in the study regions and relates the patterns to population change in the regions by land use type.
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