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FIRST QUANTITATIVE EXERCISE:
POPULATION PROJECTIONS
DUE IN CLASS TUESDAY, APRIL 8 AT 1:30 P.M.
This is one of four quantitative exercises, of which you must choose three.
Through your reading of Livi-Bassi on Population, you know how the interaction of fertility and mortality drives population growth. You should also understand how, in modern situations, mortality does not vary too much between populations, so that fertility is the driving factor in population change.
So your assignment here is to look at the effects of different levels of predicted fertility on world population trends, which will of course influence all kinds of environmental variables. Go to the World Population Prospects Database and find TFRs (Total Fertility Rates) for various countries. From these, make and defend a range of reasonable assumptions about what might happen to world fertility in the next 100 to 200 years. Take the high, low, and middle fertility levels within this range. Assume that fertility stabilizes in 2200 and stays the same for the next 800 years after that, until the year 3000. Then, using your high, middle, and low projected fertility levels , project world population in 2500 and again in 3000.
Finally, write a page or so on the implications for the environment of these different projections.
Points for doing effective quantitative exercises:
- Each quantitative exercise should be no more than 3 pages in length. I will not read page 4.
- References can be in any standard footnote, endnote, or embedded reference format. If you use endnotes or embedded references, the notes or bibliography may appear on page 4.
- Each exercise should consist of the use of data, calculations, and statistics of your own choosing to illustrate a point about the environmental problem posed.
- Exercises will be graded on reliability of the data used; appropriateness of specific data, calculations, and statistics to the problem posed; accuracy of calculations, and persuasiveness of arguments made on the basis of the calculations.
- Remember: Figures are human creations. How your calculations come out depends not only on the accuracy and completeness of your data and on how well you do your calculations, but also on how you frame the question and how you interpret the data and the calculations. For this reason, some of your exercises include the requirement to reflect on your own biases in selecting your particular data and in doing the calculations the way you did.
Processes and grading:
- All the quantitative exercises are due at the beginning of a class. You should print out your exercise and bring it to class that day; we will spend the first 25-30 minutes of the class going over the exercise. You should also turn it in electronically to the instructor before the beginning of class. If you have drawings, etc., you can scan and send as a .jpg or, better yet, if you have the capability to do that, as a .pdf.
- I will grade and return exercises, with comments, within one week of the due date.
- A is 4.0, A- is 3.7, B+ is 3.3, B is 3.0, etc.
- Late exercises will be graded down one letter-scale point (A to A-, B- to C+) at 1:30 p.m. on the due date, and one more letter-scale point for each additional calendar day they are late.
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