Demographic impacts on landscape change – a conceptual view of global demographic trends

Demographic changes will not only impose new challenges on developing regions, developed countries, and countries in transition alike but also will face changes in population without precedence during the next decades. In the latter the population will age and in some cases even decline by number. Related to the ongoing demographic change more and more rural and especially remote areas will furthermore lose population by out migration to urban areas, often leading to an uneven sex and age distribution of the people leaving behind. The demographic change will influence the economic activities in rural areas, such as, e.g. traditional agricultural production patterns and will therefore modify the usage of formerly agricultural landscapes. The same applies to urbanized areas where more and more agricultural landscapes will be modified by incorporating them into the growing urban agglomerations, e.g. for purposes of housing, industry or transport. For this reason the knowledge of the future population developments and their related impacts on the change of landscapes is crucial in understanding and predicting processes of landscape change at a whole. Thus the paper presents a conceptual view on the relationship of demographic and landscape changes based on key figures on the major aspects of the projected future population development, contrasting the population processes of developed countries and countries in transition with those of developing regions.

Keywords: Demographic change; demographic transition; society-nature interactions; landscape change