Understanding the relationship between drought and population dynamics is increasingly important, particularly
in areas where high population growth corresponds with increasing drought risk due to climate change. We
examine the relationship between drought events and population dynamics using a stylized hydrology-demography
model that has been calibrated to simulate plausible feedbacks for the population decline of the Ancient
Maya of Central America. We employ a deterministic and a stochastic approach.
We find that the impact of drought increases abruptly once a critical threshold of population density is exceeded.
The critical threshold depends on the intensity and duration of the drought as well as on the level of technology adopted
by society, the extent of markets and societal behavior. The simulations show that, for a society to be as food secure
post-climate change as they are pre-climate change, strategies would have to be adopted to not only increase the
region's capacity to provide sufficient resources for its growing population, but also to buffer the impact of a drier
climate on productivity. This study provides suggestions on how technological, societal and economic development can
modify the system to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the human population.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6712 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Kuil, Linda, Carr, Gemma, Prskawetz, Alexia, Salinas, José Luis, Viglione, Alberto, Blöschl, Günter |
| Publisher | Elsevier |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.10.018, http://www.elsevier.com, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6712/ |
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