Unit 2 (Population & Migration)

Population Density

Lesson Vocab

  • Population: Groups of people

  • Population Distribution: the pattern of human habitation on the earth’s surface

    • Distribution asks “where to people live?”

Population Distribution Factors

Physical Factors:

  1. Climate

  2. Landforms

  3. Bodies of Water

Human Factors:

  1. Culture

  2. Economics

    • Economics can often be a major reason for migration

  3. History

    • How populations were distributed int he past can have a strong influence on how they are distributed in the present

  4. Politics

Calculating Population Density

Lesson Vocab

  • Population Density: A measure of how many people occupy a given unit of land

    • Asks “how many people live here”

  • Arable Land: Land that can be used for agriculture

Calculating Population Density

  • Arithmetic Density= Total Population/TotalLand Area

    • Does not account for distribution of most of the population

    • Assumes that the population is distributed evenly across a given area of land

  • Physiological Density= Total Population/ Total Arable Land

    • The higher the physiological density, the more pressure there is to produce enough food

  • Agricultural Density= Total Farmers/Total Arable Land

    • A lower agricultural density means that farming has become mechanized in more developed countries

Why Density and Distribution Matter

Lesson Vocab

  • Carrying Capacity: The maximum population an environment can support

    • Not all people use the same amount of resources, therefore it is difficult to determine

Effects of Distribution and Density

  1. Political Process

  2. Economic Processes

    • Governments also allocate money for infrastructure projects like roads and bridges

  3. Social Processes

  4. Environment and Natural Resources

Population and Composition

Lesson Vocab

  • Population Composition: The measure of certain characteristics of a population like age, race, gender, etc.

  • Dependents: People who depend on others to survive, usually children under age 15 and elderly people over age 65

    • Higher dependency ration, more pressure on the working population

    • Higher dependency ration entails that there are less people working

    • A lower dependency ratio entails that more people int he population are working

      • # Dependents/# Working Age * 100

Population Composition

  1. Age Structure

    • An organization of a population based on age groups

    • Knowing how many people fit into different age groups helps enable geographers to draw conclusions about whether a population is growing or stable or declining

  2. Sex Ratio

    • Represents a comparison of males to females in a population

Population Dynamics

Lesson Vocab

  • Population Dynamics: How geographers study the trends in population growth or decline

  • Life Expectancy: How long an average person is expected to live

  • RNI: Rate of natural increase

    • Positive RNI means the population is growing and a negative RNI means the population is declining

  • Doubling Time: How long it will take for a given population to double given the current population growth trends

Population Dynamics

  1. Fertility Rate

    • A measure of a population’s ability to have children

    • Knowing the fertility rate is useful for governments who want to know if their populations are going, remaining stable, or declining

  2. Mortality Rate

    • Indicate a populations rate fo death

Measuring the Fertility Rate

  1. Crude Birth Rate

    • The number of births per 1000 people in a given year

  2. Total Fertility Rate

    • The average number of children one woman will have during her child bearing years (age 15-49)

      • A country’s total fertility rate is often a signal of that country’s access to healthcare and medical services

      • Lower total fertility rate usually entails that a nation has more access to fertility rate

Measuring the Mortality Rate

  1. Crude Death Rate

    • Measures the number of deaths per 1000 people

  2. Infant Mortality Rate

    • The number of children who die before they reach the age of 1 per 1000 live births

      • The infant mortality rate is often a better indicator of a country’s access to healthcare than CDR

Geographers use both the crude birth rate and crude death rate together when they want to study changes in population

  • CBR−CDR=RNICBR-CDR=RNI

    1. Migration

      • The RNI says nothing about population increase or decline due to migration

Growth/Decline Factors

Lesson Vocab

Factors influencing Growth & Decline

  1. Social and Cultural

    • E.g. different country’s have different expectations for different genders

  2. Political Factors

    • E.g. China’s one child policy for population decrease

  3. Economic Factors

    • Fertility rates often decline during economic downturns as people may be worried that they will not be able to afford taking care of children

Demographic Transition Model

Lesson Vocab

  • Demographic Transition Model: Theoretical model that traces how populations grow and decline

  • Agrarian: People are mainly farmers

  • Pre-Industrial: Everything people needed to love like clothes and tools were made by hand and not machines

  • Industrialization: Marked a transition from agrarian society to modern, mechanized society

  • Epidemiological Transition Model: Looks at population growth though a scope of disease

    • Focuses on the death rate and tries to explain why the death rate changes over time

  1. Oversimplifies the causes of population change due to diseases

  2. Doesn’t account for poverty as a cause of the spread of disease

Malthusian Theory

Lesson Vocab

Malthusian Theory

  • While the population of Europe was growing exponentially, the food supply was growing arithmetically

  • Basically worried that as the population grew there wouldn’t be enough food to feed the population, ultimately resulting in famine

Population Policies

  • Population data matters to governments

Lesson Vocab

  • Antinatalist Policies: Policies intended to decrease the number of children born

    • E.g. One child policy

  • Pronatalist Policies: Policies intended to increase the number of babies born

How Data Influences Governments

  1. Antinatalist Policies

  2. Pronatalist Policies

  3. Immigration Policies

    • Either allow more immigrants in or restrict the flow if immigrants

Women and Demographics

  • In places where women’s status is elevated and they have more access to healthcare, contraception, and education, fertility rates tend to decrease

  • In places that uphold more traditional gender roles, which is to say, women are mainly seen as the bearers of children, fertility rates tend to increase

Elevating Women’s Roles

  1. Access to Education

    • When women have access to more education, they tend to have fewer children

  2. Family Planning

    • Includes medical technologies that can help women have more control over when and if they get pregnant

  3. Employment

Women’s Effect on Mortality and Migration

  1. Mortality

    • As women have more access to education, health care, and family planning, they have fewer babies

      • The fewer babies that are born the more likely they are to live

    • As women are elevated, the infant mortality rate decreases

  2. Migration

    • Ernst Georg Ravenstein (19th century geographer)

    • Developed 11 laws of migration to explain: how, why, and under what conditions people migrate

      • Law 6 states that women are more likely to migrate within their home country while men are more likely to migrate to other countries

Aging Population

Lesson Vocab

  • Aging Population: A population in which the dependency ratio is increasing

    • Tend to have a lower total fertility rate (<2.1)

Consequences of an Aging Population

  1. Political

  2. Social

  3. Economic

Causes of Migration

Lesson Vocab

  • Immigration: People coming into a country

  • Emigration: Refers to people leaving a country

Why People Migrate

  1. Push Factors

    • Negative experiences that push people out of their country

  2. Pull Factors

    • Positive factors that attract migrants to new places

Categories of Push/Pull Factors

  1. Cultural (e.g. persecution)

  2. Demographic (e.g., lack of healthcare)

  3. Economic (e.g., finding work)

  4. Environmental (e.g., more desirable climates)

  5. Political (e.g., war)

Forced Migration vs. Voluntary Migration

Lesson Vocab

  • Voluntary Migration: Migration that occurs when people leave their homes because they want to

  • Forced Migration: Migration that occurs when people leave their homes against their will

    • People often flee their country because of ar or persecution

    • Refugees: Cross international borders

    • Internally Displaces Persons: Migrate within their home country

Seven Categories of Voluntary Migration

  1. Transnational

    • Migrants retain strong ties to their culture and famiy back home while they live in a place that is not their home

  2. Transhumance

    • Migration by people who move not because of unforeseen push/pull factors but because movement is their way of life

  3. Internal Migration

    • Migration within the borders of a country

      • According the Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration: Most migrations occur over shorter distances because there are less intervening obstacles encountered over shorter distances

  4. Chain Migration

    • One group of migrants can often cause other migrants to follow them

  5. Step Migration

    • A migrant’s journey often occurs in stages, or steps, not all at once

  6. Guest Workers

    • A temporary form of migration in which migrants travel to a new country to work for a specified amount of time

  7. Rural-to-Urban

    • The movement of people from sparsely populated countrysides to densely populated urban centers

Effects of Migration

  1. Political

    • Can change the distribution of political powers

  2. Economic Effects

    • Can be felt at destination and with the loss of people from the population

  3. Cultural