Population aging projections across the US show a divide between cities and rural areas, which could lead to pockets of vulnerability to climate change.
Population aging projections across the US show a divide between cities and rural areas, which could lead to pockets of vulnerability to climate change.
Rural parts of the US are aging more rapidly than urban areas, which could lead to greater vulnerability to climate change in those areas, according to new IIASA research.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, provides new spatially explicit projections of the US population age structure over the 21st century under five socioeconomic scenarios developed for climate change research - the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways.
“The question we were trying to answer in this research, was whether by simply assuming the same age distribution for all of the US would be sort of ‘good enough’ or if that would get the picture quite wrong because counties across the country do indeed vary a lot by their age structure and are therefore exposed to climate risks to different degrees,” says IIASA researcher Erich Striessnig, who led the study. “Once that question was answered, we could go on to look into what past spatial shifts in age-structure would imply for the future distribution of aging and thus climate vulnerability across the US.”
Read more at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
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