Chair
Lori Hunter (USA)

co-ordinator
Alex de Sherbenin (USA)

Membership
Alisson Barbieri (Brazil)
Christophe Guilmoto (France)
Robin Marsh (USA)
Landis McKellar (USA)
Kwasi Nsiah-Gyabaah (Ghana)
Sureeporn Punpuing (Thailand)
Michael Teitelbaum (USA)
Wayne Twine (South Africa)

Council Liaison
Zeng Yi

IUSSP Secretariat Contact Person
Paul Monet

Terms of Reference

PERN is an interdisciplinary network open to researchers and policymakers interested in population and environment issues. The network's website is hosted by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University. As an Internet-based forum accessible to researchers and practitioners worldwide, PERN provides members with access to the latest publications and research on population and environment issues and fosters international cooperation and capacity building. Through regular cyber seminars, scholars in developed and developing countries participate in debates on population and environment issues. PERN provides its members services such as a regular email update called What's New with information on upcoming conferences, workshops, job and grant opportunities, and a keyword-driven searchable member database. PERN also collects and disseminates ongoing, new, and classic work in the population-environment field in an online eLibrary and the Population-Environment Collection provides monthly links to all new Population-Environment articles in 70 different journals, permitting easy tracking of research developments.
For more information please visit the PERN website :
www.populationenvironmentresearch.org

Programme of Activities

Cyberseminar on “Population-Development-Environment Linkages in the Sudano-Sahelian Zone of West Africa”
Cyberspace, 3-14 September 2007

For more information on the seminar, visit the PERN website:
http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/seminars.jsp

Cyber-seminar on “Population and Natural Hazards”
Cyberspace, 29 October-12 November 2007

For more information on the seminar, visit the PERN website:
http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/seminars.jsp

20-24 April 2006
Cyber-seminar on “Rural Household Micro-Demographics, Livelihoods and the Environment

One of the major areas of population-environment research in the past decade has focused on household-level population dynamics and their relationship, through livelihood strategies, to environmental change. Studies have investigated the relationship between population variables such as household size, age and sex composition, fertility, on-farm population density, migration, and a range of other household-level socio-economic variables, on the one hand, and biophysical variables such as forest cover, coastal mangroves, soil quality, and firewood and water use, on the other. The seminar’s objectives will be to identify common findings from these studies, and to discuss methodological issues.
PERN cyberseminars are online discussions open to any researcher in the social or natural sciences. For more information on the seminar, visit the PERN website:
http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/seminars.jsp
or contact pernadmin@populationenvironmentresearch.org

Population Dynamics and Millennium Development Goal 7: “Ensuring Environmental Sustainability” 5-16 September 2005
This seminar is co-sponsored by the UN Millennium Project (MP). For more information please visit: http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/seminars.jsp.

Cyber-Seminar: "Urban Expansion: The Environment and Health Dimensions. 29 November-15 December 2004

For more information please visit:
http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/seminars.jsp.

Cyber-Seminar on Population, Consumption and Environment Dynamics
17-31 May 2004.

Call for participation

PERN Workshop on Population, Consumption and the Environment, Montréal, Canada, 19 October 2003.

This workshop, held in conjunction with the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community, addressed the conceptual linkage between population, consumption and environment, propose theoretical frameworks and consider the methodological challenges facing researchers. Building upon the research areas set by the National Research Council's publication edited by Stern et al. (1997) in Environmentally Significant Consumption: Research Directions, the goal of this session was to lay out a research agenda for better understanding population, consumption and environment dynamics in the 21st century. The session also showed material presented at the three day Open Meeting for the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community. The result of the session is a research agenda that extends the research questions described by Stern et al. (1997); that explores theories of population, consumption and environment linkages (between developed and less developed countries); and that proposes research methods and data for this relatively new area of research.

Workshop Report

ISSC-IHDP Workshop on Social Science Perspectives on Sustainable Development
Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias (CRIM), Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1-2 December 2003

The International Social Science Council (ISSC) and the International Human Dimensions Programme for Global Environmental Change (IHDP) co-organized this meeting. It convened 48 social scientists from a broad range of disciplines representing various ISSC constituencies, including IUSSP, IHDP, the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP), the International Peace Research Association, and the International Geographical Union. IUSSP was represented at the meeting by Alex de Sherbinin, Coordinator of the joint IUSSP-IHDP Population-Environment Research Network (PERN). The first day of the workshop included an introduction by ISSC's Secretary General, Dr. Lourdes Arizpe, overview presentations on IHDP's four science projects, and presentations by ISSC representatives on poverty and sustainable development. The second day included breakout sessions and focused on areas of mutual interest, exploring ways in which IHDP could more concretely collaborate with the scientific unions under ISSC. PERN was presented as one model that could help foster collaboration and networking.

Workshop Summary