Reciprocal Relations Between Population and Environment

Investigators:   William Axinn, Jennifer S. Barber, Ann E. Biddlecom, Tom E. Fricke, Arland Thornton, Dirgha Ghimire, Lynette Hoelter

This project investigates the reciprocal relations between changes in population processes and the environment in Nepal. It gathers and links data on environmental quality and population processes to data on community contexts and family formation from the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) of 151 Nepalese neighborhoods. The project looks at the reciprocal relationships between changes in marriage timing, household fission, childbearing, and migration and changes in land use, water quality, and flora diversity. It also explores the extent to which the observed relationships are produced by exogenous changes in the social and institutional context. Existing historical data on environmental factors are merged with historical data on community-level social and institutional changes and with individual-level histories of demographic events being gathered by the CVFS. Also, new measures gauge variations in environmental factors in the neighborhoods studied by the CVFS, and a 3-year household registry from the 1,400 sampled households gathers monthly data on major demographic events and agricultural activities. Linking these new data with data from the CVFS on the changing social and institutional contexts in these communities permits exploration of the extent to which these contextual changes produce the observed links between population and the environment.

Funding Period: 01/01/2001 to 05/31/2007

PSC Research Themes:

Population and the Environment (Population Dynamics)
Nepal (Regional Studies)
Contextual Effects (Group Disparities)


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