What do we know about environmental change and fertility? Both in quantitative terms – levels of fertility of specific regions or groups, changes in sex ratios – and in qualitative terms – sterility, sub-fecundity, premature birth, birth defects, birth weight - to what extent are environmental factors important? It is particularly important to assess prospects for these relationships in a context of low fertility and increasing environmental vulnerability.

What is the impact on mortality rates of environmental factors? What is the relationship between epidemiologic transition and environmental change? Much of the work on health and environment has been carried out by epidemiologists who establish causal relations between factors, but do not assess the cumulative effect on mortality. Again, in an approaching era of low mortality at the world level, how will environmental factors shape the profile of health? Relevant questions include exposition to chemical compounds in the home and workplace; ambient air pollution; the rapid distribution of new disease strains in a globalised world; and the consequences of disrupting natural environments, until recently isolated from systematic contact with society.

Population distribution processes are perhaps the most volatile dimensions of the population/environment relationship. How may we synthesise the tendencies of growing Urbanisation, internal and international migration, widely varying population densities (megacities vs. depopulated rural areas) in respect to their consequences for the quality of the natural resource base? To what extent has the new environmental consciousness lead to greater governmental planning with regard to the location of economic activities (and consequent population distribution) vis-à-vis natural resource considerations?

How may we define specific vulnerable populations? Environmental risks – especially those at the local level – are not felt universally, but by groups living or working in specific settings. How have populations in situations of environmental risk been identified and analysed? How have environmental factors impacted on distinct age and sex categories? What part of the health consequences of environmental factors is felt by infants, children, the elderly, women in childbearing years, youth?

What have been the methodological advances in this field and how have they contributed to better understanding of these relationships? How have different temporal and spatial scales been handled? What new units of analysis (such as river basins) have been used by demographers? What have we really learned – and what may we still learn – from the incorporation of GIS in demographers’ toolkits?

It is to be hoped that such syntheses of the relation of environmental features to fundamental demographic factors will contribute both to orientating new research in the respective fields and to advancing the quest for an integrated theory of demographic dynamics and environmental change – still an elusive goal for students of population and environment.