Projecting population, projecting climate change: population in IPCC scenarios
While population is widely recognized as one of the driving forces behind the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, this paper shows that it is not adequately accounted for in the emissions scenarios produced in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The paper examines the assumptions about fertility, mortality and migration that are built into the low, medium and high variations of the population projections used in scenarios of emissions growth. The SRES shows the implications of changes in population size on emissions, but fails to account for other demographic trends such as urbanization, age structure, and household composition.