140 and 141 – Earth Model-Human Model
Principal Investigator(s): E. Kalnay
Human population and consumption has grown significantly over the past few decades. The Earth’s natural resources were assumed to be practically infinite for the whole length of the history, but we are now realizing that they may be scarce. This has rung a bell for the policy makers, scientists, economists, and all other conscious individuals. Economic growth has reached an “uneconomic growth” phase. To cope with such issues, new fields of study like “ecological economics” are born. Several research groups around the globe have developed (mathematical) models to predict the future of human population and nature. Such models have helped scholars to understand and investigate possible scenarios for the future of life on our planet more thoroughly.
The most complete versions of such models incorporate population, climate, energy, and agriculture as main variables. However, some of these variables, like population, are taken as exogenous variables and therefore, the coupling between the variables is uni-directional. This means that, for example, increased population can affect climate by creating more pollution, but the climate change does not feed back on the population.
