[This includes a brief update in June 2023, at the end, responding to an article in The Economist]

The dramatic economic growth of the last 250 years happened simultaneously with equally dramatic increases in population and concentrations of C02 in the atmosphere.

The specific question I address in this post is: What might happen with economic growth now that it has become clear that total fertility rates are dropping well below replacement levels in all high income countries and that the use of the atmosphere over the past three centuries as a free way to dispose of carbon generated by economic and population growth is now leading to rapidly increasing costs as a result of disasters caused by extreme weather.

Long-term parallel paths
Graphs of changes over the last two millennia in global population, economic well-being (represented by GDP per capita) and concentration of carbon in the atmosphere all show a dramatic increase beginning in the 18th century and continuing to the present. These have been world-historical changes. Before the middle of the 18th century annual growth rates were about 0.01%, in other words scarcely changing. Then somewhere between 1750 and 1800 they all began to accelerate and since have grown at rates exceeding 1.5% a year, doubling every forty-five years or so.

(NOTE: many of the graphs I use here are screen captures from Our World in Data, an excellent source of data about many different topics. On their website many of the originals are interactive, allowing the horizontal time scale to be adjusted and/or different countries to be represented. These tools are not active here, and some embedded captions may be incorrect).

In terms of economic growth, regardless of what its origins are thought to be, there is no question, as the Bank of England has noted wryly, that it is quite a new thing. Before the 18th century overall standards of living, as well as populations and CO2 concentrations had scarcely changed for several millennia.

However, if they are considered just over the last 250 years, these changes seem more like smooth slopes than cliffs. Populations, initially in industrialized countries and later in less developed ones, began to edge up in the late 18th century and then to gradually accelerate until the mid-20th century. GDP per capita and CO2 concentrations followed a similar growth curve, though they lagged population growth by about half a century.

Interconnected growth
It seems to be the case that each of these three trends has contributed to the more or less simultaneous growth of the others.

Populations began to grow in European nations at about the same time the paradigm of economic growth associated with capitalism came to be adopted, and the same time as innovations in science enabled ideas about growth and progress to be translated into technologies that took advantage of the free good of the atmosphere as a way to dispose of CO2 emissions and increase productivity.

That increase in productivity led to higher GDP per capita and less poverty, which contributed to a decline in child mortality, which led to faster population growth, which (together with colonial expansion and global trading), provided larger markets for industrial goods, the production and use of which led to more carbon emissions, and so forth up the last quarter of the 20th century. In other words, population growth facilitated economic growth even as it was itself facilitated by the benefits of economic growth.

There was concern in the early 19th century that rapid population growth would lead to deprivation because food production could not keep pace with it. This turned out to be unwarranted because after about 1850 annual rates of economic growth (as reflected in GDP per capita, increased life expectancy and reductions in poverty) came to exceed rates of population growth. By 2006 global rates of annual increase in GDP per capita, at 1.94%, were almost three times the population growth rate of 0.76% per year.

What this suggests is first that population growth was, and in some places still is, an important initial stimulus to economic growth, and secondly that at some stage economic growth begins to occur independently.

Now, however, it seems possible that this independence might be threatened, partly because of falling population growth rates and declining populations, and partly because of the rapidly increasing costs of climate warming that are a consequence of carbon concentrations.

Population Decline
Rates of world population growth peaked at just over 2% a year in 1968, have declined since to about 1%, and are projected to drop precipitously to 0.1% by 2100. The time lag between rates of growth and actual populations means that world population is still rising, but the following graph, based on UN projections, suggests that the global population will gradually slow and stabilize at about 10.9 billion in 2100 as birth and death rates come more or less into balance and the global demographic transition is completed.

Two other population projections offer a different view. The Wittgenstein Centre takes into consideration improved levels of contraception, female education and fertility rates, and suggests that global population will peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and then begin to decline because of pronounced drops in Asia, though these will be partially offset by continuing increases in sub-Saharan Africa until the end of the century.

The apparently gentle curve for global population decline masks what are likely to be substantial changes for individual countries, as indicated below. Populations in China, Russia, Japan, Italy and Spain are already beginning to shrink, and Germany and Vietnam will soon follow.

A third population projection, published in The Lancet in 2020, forecasts even earlier and greater levels of decline than these graphs show. It anticipates that global population will peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, and then fall to 8.8 billion by 2100. More specifically, it suggests that populations of 23 countries will decline by about half over the course of this century. These include Japan (128 million to 60 million), China (1.4 billion to 732 million), Spain (46 to 23 million; Italy (61 to 31 million).

The reason for these steep declines, revealed in tables accompanying the article, is that total fertility rate, the number of children born per woman of child-bearing age, has already fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 in those countries, and indeed in every country in Europe and North America. India and Latin American will soon follow, and by 2100 only a handful of countries will be sustaining their population. The authors of the Lancet article do not expect fertility rates to recover to replacement levels.

Consequences of Population Decline
The consequences of global population decline are half a century or more in the future. But for some countries declines are already underway, and within one or two decades will amount to reductions of many millions. It is not entirely clear what the consequences of this scale of population loss will be. It has been argued by some that fewer people should mean a reduction in environmental impacts, less congestion, and higher wages because there well be fewer people working. However, if GDP per capita continues to grow in spite of population decline, then environmental impacts could actually increase because wealthier individuals have larger environmental footprints than poor people. Moreover, there are strong indications that urbanization is increasing even as populations decline, which means that congestion in cities is unlikely to diminish. And some economists have made a compelling case that lower fertility rates are associated with growing economic inequality because inherited wealth is concentrated among fewer children.

If GDP per capita does not continue to grow at a rate that can offset the loss of population, a falling tax base will lead to a decline in basic services, and probably reduced technological and other innovation because that usually come from the young. But if GDP per capita continues to grow faster than the decline in population, as it has recently in Japan, standards of living will actually improve as populations fall.

The authors of the Lancet report think that shrinking and aging populations will pose substantial economic problems as governments struggle to cope with smaller working age populations and fewer taxpayers to provide funds need to meet the growing needs of the elderly, including health care and pensions. Some countries, such as Canada, are expected to continue to maintain or grow their populations through liberal immigration policies, but in others “the desire to maintain a linguistic and culturally homogeneous society will outweigh the economic, fiscal, and geopolitical risks of declining populations”. In other words, population decline could lead to intensifying nationalist and exclusionary political views.

Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford, has made what thus far seems to be the most sophisticated theoretical investigation of the economic impacts of declining populations. In his paper “The End of Economic Growth?” he pursues the idea that in many economic growth models the size of a growing population plays a crucial role because it leads to the growth of new ideas. When he introduces population decline (he refers to it as “negative growth”) into these mathematical models, the result is that innovation and the stock of knowledge stagnate and economic growth grinds to a halt. His conclusion is that if this happens standards of living will stabilize at a reasonably high level, but the population will continue to fall.

At least one commentator, Robert Harding in the Financial Times, suggests that in fact these processes may already be at work in Japan where, even though GDP per capita has risen, almost all recent income growth for working people has been soaked up by tax rises and higher house prices, factors that suppress fertility and therefore contribute to the ongoing population decline.

Under such conditions it will become increasingly difficult to maintain infrastructure and services such as public transit, first as individual buildings are abandoned, and then as neighbourhoods and rural communities become increasingly deserted. Unless the drop in fertility is offset by immigration from places where populations continue to expand, the enormous legacy of built environments created for peak populations will become a growing burden for aging and smaller populations.

The Costs of Climate Warming
Since the 1980s it has become obvious that treating the atmosphere as a convenient and free way to dispose of CO2 emissions has contributed to a steady rise in global mean temperature. This has serious implications for causing changes in climate and weather, especially extreme weather, for the rest of this century and beyond.

I will begin this consideration of the costs of climate change with evidence of recent trends in natural disasters.

In spite of this increase, since 1970 there has only been a modest increase in the number of annual globally reported natural disasters (especially floods and extreme weather), and suggestions of a slight decline since 2006.

Global damage losses from extreme weather, also suggest an upward trend, but if those are considered as a share of GDP this is not the case, presumably because GDP has grown at least as quickly as those losses. On average about 60,000 people a year die from natural disasters, about 0.1% of all deaths.

However, these data on economic losses have to be interpreted carefully because there is confusion in the way losses from weather disasters are calculated, and there is a tendency to underestimate long-term effects (Botzen, Deschenes, Sanders, 2019). Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that, although natural disasters get national and international media coverage, their economic losses tend to be regional and fairly short-lived. In smaller nations, such as those of the Caribbean that are prone to major hurricanes, impacts on GDP may still be substantial, and have a significant opportunity cost because funds used for reconstruction might otherwise have been used for development initiatives.

In countries with large diversified economies, such as the United States the costs of natural disasters are relatively minor (usually less than 1% of GDP, though in 2020 the $450 billion damages were about 2.25% of GDP, which was about $21 trillion). Nevertheless, they are a growing concern. Detailed records of the costs of major disaster events (by NOAA, shown below) indicate an upward trend. The number of events has grown from 2.9 in the 1980s, 5.4 in the 1990s and 6.3 in the 2000s, to 12.3 in the 2010s, and so far in 2020 and 2021alone there have been 20 major events. If this trend continues losses from climate related disasters will suppress annual growth rates in GDP, which have averaged about 3% for the last fifty years, and are declining in higher income countries.

This trend also needs to be put in the context of projections of global warming. Global mean temperature has already risen about 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. How much further it will rise depends on mitigation measures and political will. The most optimistic outlook, according to Climate Action Tracker in November 2021, is an increase to 1.8C, but current policies and actions suggest something closer to or more than 2.5C. Increases of these magnitudes could lead to catastrophic losses from extreme weather in many regions of the world.

This, together with the evidence that temperatures and CO2 concentrations are greater than they have been in human history, indicates that recent trends of the number and costs of weather related environmental disasters offer few guides about what is to come. It is inevitable that the costs of dealing with climate change will climb rapidly and possibly exponentially, not only because of the damage they will cause, but also because of the transformative changes required to move closer to net zero, and because of the need to implement adaptations to handle more extreme weather that will include major expenses such things as protecting cities from rising sea levels and relocating climate refugees. It is possible that growing costs of weather disasters could almost negate annual growth in GDP.

Does this mean the end of economic growth?
When I began to think about the relationship between economic growth, population decline and climate change, my assumption was that the costs of coping with climate disasters, coupled with steadily aging and shrinking populations would be huge brakes on economic growth. However, what I have learned is that is not necessarily the case. It seems that economic growth has broken free of population growth, and one of its main drivers is now innovation, which can allow GDP per capita to be maintained even as populations decline. And it seems that the economic costs of natural disasters, at least in large diversified economies, thus far have amounted to a small percentage of total GDP, and the reconstruction following those disasters can count as contributions to GDP. While this percentage will grow in the future, I have found no indications or opinions that climate change, alone or in combination with population decline, will bring an end to overall economic growth and increases in per capita GDP.

However, from the perspective of particular places matters look rather different (as I have discussed in previous posts here and here). In some regions of the world, rural communities, small towns and even cities, face a future that involves a combination of slowly withering away as people age and the young move away, and the possibility of acute disasters of heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires. Economies may continue to grow, but over the next hundred years geographies will change dramatically and everyday life in places everywhere will become more challenging.

[An afterthought, two days after posting this. I can’t help thinking that I have understated the possible impacts of the combined effects of population decline and climate related disasters, which could be much greater than the sum of their parts. The evidence so far is that a modest drop in population may be offset by innovation that results in growth in GDP per capita, and on average the costs of weather related disasters may only be a small percentage of GDP. But as populations drop by half, and if the costs of disasters regularly come to exceed annual growth in GDP as global temperatures climb, matters could take a very different turn ].

[An update 02 June 2023. The Economist has a leading article today “Global Fertility has collapsed with profound economic consequences: What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?” This is, for The Economist, a rather breathless consideration of global population decline that will occur later this century, written as though it is something that has just become apparent even though their writers have frequently discussed the current declines in Japan and Italy and elsewhere. It includes the remarkable comment that “The world is not close to full…” without any supporting argument, and argues, as the subtitle indicates, that we need to get population growth back on track in order to ensure economic growth (though it acknowledges that efforts in individual countries, such as Hungary and Singapore, to boost higher fertility have failed). Environmental concerns are blithely dismissed (“Whatever some environmentalists may say, a shrinking population creates problems.”)

I think this leader fails to identify the profound and clear demographic indications that economic growth and economic theory for the last three centuries or so have been tied to population growth, and that population decline will require a radically revised approach to economics, and indeed how life will be lived. The key questions are: What will economics without growth be like? How will economic systems, and for that matter urban planning, adapt to shrinkage? What will be abandoned and what retained? Or, from my perspective on place, how can places be adapted to an abundance of stuff that is no longer useful – empty houses, abandoned neighbourhoods in cities, expressways and airports and container ports that will be far too large for future needs? This may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s probably less than fifty years away.]

I have the strong impression that there are social, political and environmental shifts underway that affect places almost everywhere. Their consequence is that how places have been experienced in the past bears little relationship to how they are being experienced now and will be experience in the future as climate change, social media, and globalization intrude ever more deeply into everyday life.

These shifts are the context for Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, an edited, academic book published by Cambridge University Press (2021). This post provides a synopsis of that book because I think it pulls together important threads about the importance of understanding change through the lens of place and its messages are worth sharing . I contributed one of the chapters so I am probably biased about its merits, but I knew nothing about the other twenty-four chapters until I received a published copy. I should also add that the book is both interdisciplinary and international in its scope  The 25 chapters were written by about 60 authors from over a dozen disciplines and involved research in at least 25 different countries and six continents.

In short, I think Senses of Place provides an excellent foundation for thinking about place as we move towards the second quarter of the 21st century. An Initial Clarification This book takes the view, as Maria Lewicka and Olena Dobosh put it in their chapter on Ethnocentric Bias in Perceptions of Place, that: “Sense of place refers to the way a place is experienced. It is a mix of the sensuous reactions, cognitive images, memories and feelings that people associate with a place” (p.179). It is, in other words, a complex human faculty for making sense of the world. to be absolutely clear, this book is not about sense of place as an inherent quality of somewhere, which is an idea widely used in architecture, place branding and tourist literature. Plural Senses of Place and Global Challenges The central argument, apparent in the title and reinforced in some fashion in every chapter, is that there are plural senses of place. This revises a conventional idea that sense of place involves a relatively stable, socially shared set of attitudes about a particular place, and that these are revealed by continuity of local traditions. The research described in the chapters of this book shows that even apparently stable places are experienced in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways A second argument, no less significant, is that it is necessary to understand the multiplicity of senses of place in order to grasp the ways places are being challenged by global processes such as climate change, constant mobility, transnationalism, social media and territorial contestation. The basis for this argument is, first, that we are all ’emplaced’, which is to say we cannot avoid looking at the world and experiencing its problems except through the lens of the places we know and where we live. And secondly, while challenges may be global in scope their effects happen in particular places and particular places are where adaptive responses to the uncertainty of those challenges have to happen. It follows, though I don’t think any of the contributors put it quite this bluntly, that efforts to deal with global challenges without paying attention to the idiosyncracies of places are doomed to failure. Global Challenges and Senses of Place Summarized The book is organized around seven global challenges to place, each of which is considered in several chapters. I have slightly revised the wording for clarification, but the challenges are: • Climate Change and Environmental Degradation • Migration and Mobility • Transitions to Renewable Energy • Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims • Urban Change • Technological Transformations • Planning Strategies Except perhaps for renewable energy, which at first glance doesn’t seem to fit, there is nothing very remarkable in this list. What I do find remarkable are the detailed discussion in individual chapters and the variety of contexts that are examined through the lens of place. The following summaries of chapter in each section attempt to give a sense of that variety. Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: The challenges presented by climate change, and indeed all change to natural environments, are experienced through diverse senses of place specific to local circumstances and their history. For example the Great Barrier Reef in Australia elicits place feelings that include attachment, aesthetic pleasure, appreciation of biodiversity, and acknowledgement of its scientific value. But following the coral bleaching events of 2016 and 2017 that were caused by global warming those feelings were accompanied by a sense of grief at the deterioration of an exceptional place. This insight into the variety of senses of place associated with natural environments is amplified by case studies of places in Alaska and the American mid-west which reveal that attitudes to climate change reflect very different ‘temporalities’ or local perspectives on time. And an environmental disaster in Valparaiso in Chile demonstrates the importance of identifying this sort of variety of local knowledge and senses of places in reconstruction; without it mistakes in planning are likely to be repeated. This is also suggested by the non-linear, dynamic character of senses of place in Bengaluru in southern India where lakes that have a long history of providing water supply are now disregarded as the region rapidly urbanizes and pipes in water from 100 km away. On a more positive note, attempts at prairie restoration in the American mid-west have proven to be more successful when efforts at place-making recognize that there are plural, regional senses of place to be taken into account. Migration, Mobility and Belonging. The modern acceleration of mobility has undermined what, until about quite recently, was a prevailing sense of place that was mostly sedentary because for most people travel was dangerous or expensive and most lives were spent in just one two locations. Isolation and a sedentary sense of place facilitated the continuity of tradition and offered a strong sense of belonging somewhere. This feeling lingers in attitudes about place attachment, for example, in the relatively isolated Faroe Islands the tourist now coming to experience unspoilt landscapes are regarded ambivalently by residents because their presence threatens established ways of living even as it enhances the local economy and connections with the rest of the world. On the other hand for people in post-colonial Benin in West Africa isolation is something that is better escaped. Home is generally regarded as a place a person has to leave in order to succeed, though transnational migrants who work elsewhere develop an extroverted sense of place that incorporates many diverse experiences and includes a continuing commitment to their home place to which they send remittances. An almost mirror image of this transformation of sense of place happens with rural migrants to cities in China, who traditionally were not given full access to social spaces because it was always assumed they would return home. Official efforts are now being to change this assumption that rural migrants do not belong even though they live permanently in the city, a process that has to deal with very different conceptions of what constitutes belonging. This is not the issue in the township of Diepsloot in South Africa where upheaval and mobility seem to have resulted in a denial of most conventional notions of sense of place. It is a sort of non-place where deprivation and insecurity are omnipresent, everyone seems to be just passing through, and narratives of belonging perversely seem to be based on a psychology of non-belonging. Transitions to Renewable Energy. Renewable energy projects, both wind and solar, are so visually intrusive that they create new types of places and invoke divergent interpretations and contestations between senses of place. In New York State the installers of turbines regard them as wind farms, which suggests a positive addition to rural landscapes and places, but for protesters they demonstrate the industrialization of those landscapes. Research in the UK suggests that such contested attitudes about the impact of renewable technologies on places requires fitting them to senses of place by presenting proposed projects as nested among different scales of place. In this manner their manifest local impacts on places can be mitigated by indicating their benefits for place understood at larger spatial scales. Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims. Nationalism involves assumptions about who belongs where and a politics of place-belonging that involves issues of identity, social justice, inclusion and exclusion, and potential violence. Parts of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine lie at conjunctions of many national histories where political boundaries have often shifted. In these historically confused regions people have mostly adopted ethnocentric rather than national ways of understanding the places where they belong. Ethnocultural sense of place is also apparent with the Bodo, an indigenous group who live adjacent to the Manas Tiger Reserve in north-east India. However for the Bodo this involves a blend of self-identification and environmental practices that actually brings into question simplistic assumptions about indigenous cultures and sustainability because official recognition of the Bodo as indigenous forest dwellers has been used by them as a way to opportunistically occupy land in the Reserve and to extract lumber from it. Their conveniently shifting interpretation of place attachment has led to conflicts with other communities in the region. For Palestinians the issues of belonging to a place are immediate rather than historical because their communities are effectively under siege. The systematic destruction of homes has led to deeply ambivalent senses of place that somehow blend feelings of safety and oppression, stability and loss, rituals of everyday life that continue in spite of everything, belonging that is constantly infused with uncertainty, and resistance against displacement. Palestine, rather like Diepsloot, demonstrates extremes of just how multi-facetted and complex senses of place can be. What is clear is that it is impossible to make sense of their challenging political and social issues without attending to the ways they are experienced as places. Urban Change: Urban growth transforms places in ways that are frequently contested. Gentrification, commodification and marginalization in cities variously accelerate contested senses of place. These are continuously being reformulated and negotiated as urban neighbourhoods are redeveloped and as social and political circumstances shift. For instance, in Barcelona gentrification involves the exploitation and commodification of symbolic elements that are drawn from the sense of place of displaced previous residents because this can ensure that redevelopment and renovation are profitable. A not dissimilar process of simplification of sense of place for ulterior purposes has occurred as a way to characterize urban change in Seattle, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, with the additional aspect that divergent political perspectives are involved. The city has been variously presented for different political ends as a prosperous centre of technology (headquarters of Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and as a dying city because of the levels of homelessness and street communities that are consequence of rapidly rising house prices caused by the technology boom. For the ‘urban invisibles,’ the marginalized street communities of Brazil, the places they have to appropriate in order to survive are often exactly the same places where they are rejected as undesirable. There, as in Seattle, the competing senses of place have led to political infighting about how best to manage injustices associated with urban change. Technological Transformations: Perhaps the most widespread transformation in modern culture is the global adoption electronic communication and social media. By shrinking distance and connecting us more or less instantly with other people elsewhere, electronic media have radically altered senses of place by adding layers of information and new possibilities for experience that enrich both personal and social senses of place by making a wealth of information available and collapsing the barrier of distance. They have also diminished senses of place by distracting us from the places where we actually are, diverting our attention to virtual elsewheres, and generating echo chambers that exacerbate views that promote exclusionary senses of place. However, there are indications from case studies in Melbourne and in Denmark that social media, such as distributing images of natural settings on Instagram, can facilitate the development of a broad range of affective bonds between people and places that have proved valuable as a way to engage citizens in the development of strategies for managing the urban forest and urban food production. Design and Planning Strategies: The usual notion in urban planning is that sense of place is something that can be enhanced by design. At one time the conviction was that this could be represented on maps showing some sort of ideal end state, or perhaps by quantifying urban dynamics into measurable patterns that could be manipulated. Those approaches fail to take into account the rich variety of senses of place that people have of cities. To acknowledge and take advantage of that richness requires collaborative approaches that can accommodate and mediate diverse senses of place. Because cities are now unavoidably caught up in global flows and networks, those diverse local senses of place have to be integrated with global ones such as the international planning initiatives of the UN Habitat programme. One example of how this can be done is demonstrated in a case study of Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site in SA where participatory research and focus groups were used to identify plural local senses of place and the ways these could be incorporated into international frameworks. This study has some parallels with research in the very different context of BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, which is an experimental site in a former swimming pool that is now used for exploring innovative approaches to sustainability and placemaking through collaborative learning. The BlueCity Lab, which is itself a symbol of urban change, provides an excellent setting to investigate place-based experiences and how they can contribute to “transformative topophilia” or a sense of how change can happen through place. But some entirely different processes involving transformations of urban senses of places are happening in cities in China, where IKEA catalogues and products seem to be encouraging a culturally fluid sense of what constitutes home. The catalogues, which are globally standardized yet subtly modified to accommodate Chinese tastes, have a transformative capacity that lies in promises of translocal inclusion or being part of a global culture. The effects of IKEA may understood as “transcultural odourlessness” but they have been widely welcomed by urban Chinese people and have to be understood not so much as placeless as actually enriching and pluralising senses of place. A Concluding Comment What Senses of Place makes clear is that place is implicated in many of the challenges of the present century, and that it has to be approached as a multi-layered, multi-dimensional phenomenon that both shapes perceptions of global challenges and in diverse way is threatened by them. It is an academic  book, and some of the discussion is challenging, but it sets the stage for future thinking about place. In the concluding chapter the editors draw attention to “the plurality of place-related meanings” and discuss the importance of finding possible ways of navigating between relatively stable and more fluid attachments to places. I think this captures neatly the ambiguity in how most people now experience places, continually navigating both intellectually and in practice between local, regional and national places, between a desire for stability and a wish for change, sometimes at home, often on the move, constantly informed and connected electronically, mostly uncertain about the future.    C.M. Raymond, L.C, Manzo, D.R. Williams, A. Di Masso, T. von Wirth Ieds) Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, Cambridge University Press, 2021.