This UNFPA–IIED publication on population dynamics and climate change provides an overview of a controversial topic. Both population dynamics and climate change are interpreted broadly. The introduction notes that, while it is critical to take population dynamics into account when designing climate policies, it is a mistake to reduce the population–climate relationship to one of population growth driving greenhouse gas emissions.

Population Dynamics and the Drivers of Climate: The first two chapters review relations between population dynamics and climate change from two different perspectives. Both chapters point to the challenge that continued population growth will pose. In Chapter 1, George Martine situates this challenge within the context of broader development trends, including changes in consumption and levels of urbanization. He warns against the temptation to view family planning, and its potential for reducing population growth, as a panacea for mitigating climate change. In Chapter 2, Hania Zlotnik emphasizes a very different risk – that the decline in international support for sexual and reproductive health services has already resulted in an increase in unintended fertility, and that continued neglect could greatly amplify a range of population-related challenges, including climate change mitigation and adaptation. Taken together, the two chapters suggest the need for a balanced approach to issues of population dynamics and climate change, and not treating family planning as panacea or pariah.

Urbanization: The implications of population growth for climate change and climate vulnerability depend on the characteristics of that population – rich or poor, rural or urban – and where people are moving relative to emerging climate risks. In Chapter 3, David Satterthwaite illustrates the overwhelming influence consumption has on a population’s greenhouse gas emissions, finding very little coincidence historically between a region’s relative contribution to population growth and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. He finds the influence of urbanization to be far more ambiguous, a finding confirmed in Chapter 4 by David Dodman, which looks more specifically at urban form, greenhouse gas emissions and climate vulnerability. In short, urbanization is associated with increasing affluence and consumption, but dense urban form can also be used as a tool to reduce emissions and reduce climate vulnerability. In Chapter 5, Deborah Balk and colleagues use newly available data to map urban settlements and climate risks in Asia, Africa and Asia, focusing on settlements in low elevation coastal zones and drylands.

Migration: People may move to escape from climate-related risks, and some people have presented large population movements as one of the major risks of climate change, which could occur within the next few decades. In Chapter 6, Cecilia Tacoli reviews evidence on the relationship between environmental change and migration and comes to a rather different conclusion – that there is little reason to predict such large population movements, and good reason to look at mobility as an important adaptive response that may need more effective support. In Chapter 7, Scott Leckie takes a rights-based perspective to look more specifically at what can be done to assist people likely to be displaced by climate change.

Vulnerability: It is impossible to understand and reduce vulnerability without taking account of population dynamics. From acute, climate-related events such as storms and floods to long-term shifts in weather patterns and sea level patterns, the impacts only become clear through an understanding of who is at risk, what the risks are to people rather than places, and how these risks vary within and across populations. Vulnerability is unevenly distributed between men and women, and between the young, the middle-aged and the elderly. Sheridan Bartlett, in Chapter 8, reviews the specific vulnerabilities