Is Climate Stress Driving Tropical Depopulation?

Maia Call , National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center
Clark Gray, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This research explores the effect of climate shocks on the population growth rate of tropical countries, which are considered to be particularly vulnerable to global climate change through multiple pathways. Though the literature suggests that climate stress has implications for the population mobility path in particular, the region and country-specific nature of this research has made attempts at a global synthesis challenging. Addressing this limitation, we use census data and gridded climate data to quantitatively analyze the implications of climate change for district-level population growth across time and space for the global tropics. Preliminary findings suggest that above average temperatures have a suppressing effect on the annual population growth rate across the tropics while precipitation anomalies have a nonlinear effect on the annual population growth rate.

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 Presented in Session 46. Innovative Data and Methods for Population and Environment Research