Leiwen Jiang is founding director and professor of the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) at Shanghai University. He also leads ADRI’s research pillar on Population, Environment and Climate Change (PECC). His research involves methodological work on improving demographic components of integrated assessment modeling on environment and climate change policies. He explores the environmental implications of socioeconomic and demographic dynamics. He has been developing the Community Demographic Models (CDM) for the broader environmental and climate change research communities at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Population Council. His funded research projects explicitly explore the socio-demographic determinants of energy transition in the developing world; study the urbanization processes of different phases and forms and their effects on energy consumption, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and wildfire risks; simulate the interactions between demographic dynamics (particularly migration) and land use and water resources; and analyze household consumption patterns and other behavioral changes and their consequences on the environment and climate systems.
Leiwen taught numerous courses at Brown University and Peking University, including Population and Environment, Demographic Methods and Techniques, and Classic Readings on Population. He also worked at several other academic institutions including the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, Indiana University in the US, and was Chief Demographer at Population Action International. He is council member of Asian Population Association, was a lead author of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, chaired the Scholarship Program of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) WGIII Technical Committee, and a member of the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Climate Change.
▶Download CV ✉ ljiang@shu.edu.cn
Selected Publications
Jiang, L. B.C. O’Neill, H. Zoraghein, S. Dahlke, 2020. Population Scenarios for US state consistent with Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Environmental Research Letters, 15 (19) 094097. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aba5b1
O’Neill, B.C., L. Jiang, S. KC, R. Fuchs, S. Pauchauri, E. Laidlaw, T. Zhang, W. Zhou, X. Ren. 2020. The effect of education on determinants of climate change risks. Nature Sustainability 3 520-528. 3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0512-y
Abdelwahed, A., A. Goujon, L. Jiang, 2020. The migration intentions of young Egyptians. Sustainability 12 (23) 9803; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239803.
Striessnig, E., J. Gao, B. O’Neill, L. Jiang, 2019: Empirically based spatial projections of US population age structure consistent with the shared socioeconomic pathways. Environmental Research Letters 14 (11), 114038. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab4a3a
Jiang, L. and B. O’Neill, 2018: Determinants of urban growth during demographic and mobility transitions: evidence from India, Mexico, and the US. Population and Development Review, vol. 44 (2): 363-389. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12150
Teaching Courses
📖Population, Environment and Climate Change
This course provides a comprehensive examination of the interrelations between population, environment, and climate change with a particular emphasis on Asia. It will help student understand the impacts of population growth and compositional changes on the environment, as well as the consequences of environmental changes affecting human society.
The course is to design for students of demography, sociology, environmental studies, and other social or natural sciences who are interested in the human-nature interactions. While the conceptual framework used in the course retains a demographic focus, the course materials will reflect the topic’s interdisciplinary nature.
To achieve the objectives, we review the main theories of schools on population, development and the environment, as a foundation for critical consideration of human-induced environment degradation and its feedback on human population, the public debates on environmental justice, and sustainable development movements. Students will also learn the basics of major qualitative and quantitative methods and tools used in the analysis of population and environment interactions, through computer lab and debates. The course will use examples of various aspects of environmental changes such as land use and land cover, water, air, energy, and climate systems, under different processes and components of population dynamics i.e. fertility, mortality and morbidity, migration, urbanization, and household formation