Growth on a finite planet: resources, technology and population in the long run

Peretto, Pietro F.; Valente, Simone

doi:10.1007/s10887-015-9118-z

Cited by 71 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Our work thus also relates to Schumpeterian growth theories that circumvent the scale effect with a product-line representation of R&D (Dinopoulos and Thompson, 1998;Peretto, 1998;Young, 1998). These have been used to develop growth models with endogenous population and resource constraints, most notably Bretschger (2013) and Peretto and Valente (2015), and these theoretical contributions are thus close in spirit to our work. Our treatment of land as a scarce form of capital is, however, novel, and by taking our model to the data, we also provide new evidence on the quantitative importance of resource constraints for global development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Global Population Growth, Technology, and Malthusian Constraints: A Quantitative Growth Theoretic Perspective

Lanz

Dietz

Swanson

2017

Int Economic Review

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The MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change combines cutting-edge scientific research with independent policy analysis to provide a solid foundation for the public and private decisions needed to mitigate and adapt to unavoidable global environmental changes. Being data-driven, the Program uses extensive Earth system and economic data and models to produce quantitative analysis and predictions of the risks of climate change and the challenges of limiting human influence on the environment-essential knowledge for the international dialogue toward a global response to climate change.To this end, the Program brings together an interdisciplinary group from two established MIT research centers: the Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). These two centers-along with collaborators from the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole and short-and longterm visitors-provide the united vision needed to solve global challenges.At the heart of much of the Program's work lies MIT's Integrated Global System Model. Through this integrated model, the Program seeks to: discover new interactions among natural and human climate system components; objectively assess uncertainty in economic and climate projections; critically and quantitatively analyze environmental management and policy proposals; understand complex connections among the many forces that will shape our future; and improve methods to model, monitor and verify greenhouse gas emissions and climatic impacts.This reprint is one of a series intended to communicate research results and improve public understanding of global environment and energy challenges, thereby contributing to informed debate about climate change and the economic and social implications of policy alternatives. AbstractWe structurally estimate a two-sector Schumpeterian growth model with endogenous population and finite land reserves to study the long run evolution of global population, technological progress and the demand for food. The estimated model closely replicates trajectories for world population, GDP, sectoral productivity growth and crop land area from 1960 to 2010. Projections from 2010 onwards show a slowdown of technological progress, and because it is a key determinant of fertility costs, significant population growth. By 2100 global population reaches 12 billion and agricultural production doubles, but the land constraint does not bind because of capital investment and technological progress.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Global Population Growth, Technology, and Malthusian Constraints: A Quantitative Growth Theoretic Perspective

Lanz

Dietz

Swanson

2017

Int Economic Review

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“…The interaction between human population, technology and income has been mainly studied by endogenous growth theory, which distinguishes three phases of economic development (Galor and Weil, 2000;Kogel and Prskawetz, 2001): (1) a Malthusian regime with low rates of technological change and high rates of population growth preventing per capita income to rise; (2) a Post-Malthusian Regime, where technological progress rises and allows both population and income to grow, and (3) a Modern Growth regime characterized by reduced population growth and sustained income growth (Peretto and Valente, 2015). Transition to this third regime results from a demographic transition which reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth.…”

Section: Human Demographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Time-delayed biodiversity feedbacks and the sustainability of social-ecological systems

Lafuite

Loreau

2017

Preprint

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The sustainability of coupled social-ecological systems (SESs) hinges on their long-term ecological dynamics. Land conversion generates extinction and functioning debts, i.e. a time-delayed loss of species and associated ecosystem services. Sustainability theory, however, has not so far considered the long-term consequences of these ecological debts on SESs. We investigate this question using a dynamical model that couples human demography, technological change and biodiversity. Human population growth drives land conversion, which in turn reduces biodiversity-dependent ecosystem services to agricultural production (ecological feedback).Technological change brings about a demographic transition leading to a population equilibrium. When the ecological feedback is delayed in time, some SESs experience population overshoots followed by large reductions in biodiversity, human population size and well-being, which we call environmental crises. Using a sustainability criterion that captures the vulnerability of an SES to such crises, we show that some of the characteristics common to modern SESs (e.g. high production efficiency and labor intensity, concavedown ecological relationships) are detrimental to their long-term sustainability. Maintaining sustainability thus requires strong counteracting forces, such as the demographic transition and land-use management. To this end, we provide integrative sustainability thresholds for land conversion, biodiversity loss and human population size -each threshold being related to the others through the economic, technological, demographic and ecological parameters of the SES. Numerical simulations show that remaining within these sustainable boundaries prevents environmental crises from occurring. By capturing the long-term ecological and socioeconomic drivers of SESs, our theoretical approach proposes a new way to define integrative conservation objectives that ensure the long-term sustainability of our planet.

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“…The growth rate of human populations can be related to consumption levels [44] by capturing basic linkages between technology and human demography [45,46,47]. Using the same auxiliary economic model as in Lafuite & Loreau [33], we derive the per capita industrial and agricultural consumptions as functions of biodiversity and technological efficiency.…”

Section: Human Demography and Technological Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…By increasing production efficiency, technological change helps counterbalancing the feedback of biodiversity loss on agricultural productivity in the short term, thus ensuring that the consumption utility of consumers does not decrease with time [33]. Following previous studies [44,47], we then assume that the human growth rate endogenously varies with the mean agricultural and industrial consumptions, so as to increase with agricultural consumption, and decrease with industrial consumption, capturing the effect of the demographic transition.…”

Section: Human Demography and Technological Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Foresight is required to enforce sustainability under time-delayed biodiversity loss

Lafuite

Loreau

2017

Preprint

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Natural habitat loss and fragmentation generate a time-delayed loss of species and associated ecosystem services. Since social-ecological systems (SESs) depend on a range of ecosystem services, lagged ecological dynamics may affect their long-term sustainability. Here, we investigate the role of consumption changes in sustainability enforcement, under a time-delayed ecological feedback on agricultural production. We use a stylized model that couples the dynamics of biodiversity, technology, human demography and compliance to a social norm prescribing sustainable consumption. Compliance to the sustainable norm reduces both the consumption footprint and the vulnerability of SESs to transient overshoot-and-collapse population crises. We show that the timing and interaction between social, demographic and ecological feedbacks govern the transient and long-term dynamics of the system. A sufficient level of social pressure (e.g. disapproval) applied on the unsustainable consumers leads to the stable coexistence of unsustainable and sustainable or mixed equilibria, where both defectors and conformers coexist. Under bistability conditions, increasing time delays reduces the basin of attraction of the mixed equilibrium, thus resulting in abrupt regime shifts towards unsustainable pathways. Given recent evidence of large ecological relaxation rates, such results call for farsightedness and a better understanding of lag effects when studying the sustainability of coupled SESs.

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Growth on a finite planet: resources, technology and population in the long run

Cited by 71 publications

References 33 publications

Global Population Growth, Technology, and Malthusian Constraints: A Quantitative Growth Theoretic Perspective

Global Population Growth, Technology, and Malthusian Constraints: A Quantitative Growth Theoretic Perspective

Time-delayed biodiversity feedbacks and the sustainability of social-ecological systems

Foresight is required to enforce sustainability under time-delayed biodiversity loss

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