Policy Impact in 2012

In anticipation of the Rio+20 Summit, Pop assembled leading demographers tp prepare the Laxenburg Declaration, "Demography's Role in Sustainable Development," which was widely disseminated in 2012 

With funding from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in late 2011 POP had assembled a group on internationally leading scholars on population, development, and environment to draft a science-policy statement as input to the Rio+20 process. This statement which was also called the “Laxenburg Declaration” was widely disseminated during 2012 and a summary was also published as a Letter in Science under the title “Demography’s Role in Sustainable Development.”

The first three sentences of this letter say the follows: “In preparing for the RIO+20 Earth Summit, the world community must acknowledge that population trends interact strongly with economic development and environmental change at local and global levels. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) recently convened leading experts to consider how demographic factors promote or impede sustainable development. The panel concluded that human beings—their numbers, distribution, and characteristics—are at the center of concern for sustainable development.”

In order to widely discuss the conclusions of the Declaration, Panel the Population-Environment Research Network PERN (a collaboration of the Earth Institute and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population) held a two-week long cyber seminar with more than 100 people participating in the discussion. Some of the texts coming out of Rio+20 do, indeed, reflect the content of the statements made in the Laxenburg Declaration.


Print this page

Last edited: 15 October 2013

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313