The purpose of this discussion is to predict how a country’s demographic indicators might affect their environmental indicators by choosing indicators, creating a plot and discussing it in your post.

You will have the opportunity to develop skills/knowledge in:

• predicting, plotting and discussing the correlation between demographic and environmental indicators
• identifying demographic, social and environmental consequences of industrialization

Complete the following tasks for this discussion:

• Recall in Unit 5, Section 5 (Links to an external site.) of our reading, we learned about how population affects “resources such as land, food, water, soils, and services from healthy ecosystems, such as water filtration through wetlands. Over-consumption uses up or severely depletes supplies of non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels, and depletes renewable resources such as fisheries and forests if we use them up faster than they can replenish themselves.” For this discussion, visit Hans Rosling’s Gap minder (Links to an external site.) and create a plot including one demographic indicator and one environmental indicator. (Recall that demographic means relating to the size and structure of human population. These fall under the “Population” tab on Gapminder. Environmental indicators would be under the “Energy” or “Environment” tabs.) Include the following in your post:
  • a screenshot of your plot
  • describe which variables you chose
  • describe the relationship you found. How do the two variables relate to one another? Is it what you expected?
  • were there any surprising findings?
• In addition, respond to two other students’ posts reflecting on their plots and findings. Is the relationship they plotted between variables what you would have expected? Why or why not?

To help in the completion of this activity, here are my tips for success…

• You have until the following week’s Friday discussion deadline to reply to another student. Responses are 40% of the grade for the discussion.
• Here is an example plot. I chose all countries individual CO2 emissions (y axis, environmental indicator) versus babies per woman (total fertility rate) (x axis, demographic indicator). They have a roughly linear relationship (straight line) with very few outliers. This is what I expected – that countries with very high fertility rates have low CO2 emissions as they are less industrialized, or developed. I do find it interesting that countries that match the US in terms of fertility rate (the biggest red bubble towards the left), can also have a much lower carbon footprint.