DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE, INC.

Juan dela Cruz Street, Toril, Davao City

Landline No. (082) 291 1882
Accredited by ACSCU-ACI

GE PEE: PEOPLE AND THE EARTH'S ECOSYSTEMS

WEEK 8:
Unit 2: People in the Environment
Topic:
Lesson 13: Population Projection
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this lesson/topic, the students will be able
to;
o Define and distinguish between a population projection
and a population forecast.
o Apply simple mathematical models of growth to
extrapolate total population, and
o Undertake a straightforward projection of population
size by age and sex using the cohort-component method.

Population projections: concepts and methods

Forecasts are the basis for all forms of planning for the future.
Even a complacent assumption that life will continue much as in
the past is a form of forecast. Demographic forecasts are
fundamental to any form of social, economic, or business
planning. Suppliers of any good or service, from maternity
hospitals to the manufacturers of coffins, can only plan if they
have some idea how many potential users of their services they
can expect to be located where.
Some phenomena can be forecast with perfect accuracy. For
example, we know exactly when and where future solar eclipses
will occur. Other phenomena, such as the weather, are inherently
impossible to forecast with any certainty for more than a few
days into the future. It seems unlikely that we will ever to be
able to forecast future demographic developments with the
certainty that we can eclipses; we certainly cannot yet.
Nevertheless, human populations have two fundamental
characteristics that reduce uncertainty about how they will
develop in the future:
First, a substantial overlap exists between the current
population and the future population. For example, everyone who
will be aged 25 or more years in 25 years’ time has already been
born.
Second, one fundamental aspect of the human condition is that
every year that passes we all get exactly one year older until we
eventually die.
These two facts constrain possible future developments in a
population in ways that often have no equivalent in other fields,
 DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE, INC.
Juan dela Cruz Street, Toril, Davao City
Landline No. (082) 291 1882
Accredited by ACSCU-ACI

such as economic forecasting. Standard methods for making

population projections take full advantage of both facts.

This session provides an introduction to population projections

and forecasting. It briefly discusses projection methods based on
extrapolating population growth before describing the cohort
component projection method in more detail.
POPULATION PROJECTION
The standard way to estimate doubling time is to assume that
the population is growing exponentially and then divide 70 by the
annual growth rate stated as a percentage. Dividing into 70 is a
consequence of the mathematics of exponential growth. The
doubling time based on exponential growth is very sensitive to
the growth rate—it changes quickly as the growth rate changes.
A population projection gives a picture of what the future
size and structure of the population by sex and age might look
like. It is based on knowledge of past trends, and, for the
future, on assumptions made for three components: fertility,
mortality, and migration. Different evolution assumptions are
made for each component, constituting different scenarios. The
projections serve as a basis for long-term thinking, particularly
in terms of collective development. They make it possible to
analyze population trends if the assumptions are true but are not
forecasts. Individual behavior, certain public policy actions,
scientific progress, or unforeseen events (weather events,
epidemics) in the coming years may have a lasting effect and
significantly influence trends, which the projections do not take
into account.

A population projection can be defined as

A computational procedure to calculate population size and
structure at one time from population size and structure at
another, together with a specification of how change takes place
during the interim period.

To find population projections

Each year, the Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program
uses current data on births, deaths, and migration to calculate
population change since the most recent decennial census and
produces a time series of estimates of population, demographic
components of change, and housing units.

Strategies for projecting populations

Two contrasting approaches exist for carrying out projections:
 DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE, INC.
Juan dela Cruz Street, Toril, Davao City
Landline No. (082) 291 1882
Accredited by ACSCU-ACI

Total methods
Total methods calculate trends in the size of the population as a
whole using a mathematical model of population growth. They may
then distribute this total into sub-groups in ratio to the
current structure of the population or an extrapolated forecast
of its structure. Therefore, such approaches are sometimes known
instead as ratio methods of projection.

Cohort component methods

Cohort component methods project each age group, sex, and other
category of interest separately. They then aggregate the results
to obtain the total population. The term cohort emphasizes that
an age group is made up of people born at the same time who go
through life together. The size of a cohort at one age (and date)
is strongly predictive of its size at other ages (and dates).
Many population projections combine both approaches, although
projections dominated largely by the cohort component approach
are by far the most common. Nevertheless, cohort component
methods require many more input data and assumptions than total
methods and may be inappropriate:
o if only estimates of total numbers are needed
o if the information required as input to component methods is
lacking for very long-term projections.

Total methods of projection

Total methods of projection involve fitting a mathematical model
to data on past trends in the size of the population and using
the fitted model to extrapolate the population forward (or on
occasion backward into the more distant past).

The main steps involved in the procedure are to:

o select an appropriate model of the growth process.
o estimate the parameters of the model from past estimates of
the population.
o extrapolate the fitted curves and read off the projected
population.

Cohort-component population projections

Cohort-component method population projections:
 DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE, INC.
Juan dela Cruz Street, Toril, Davao City
Landline No. (082) 291 1882
Accredited by ACSCU-ACI

model the age-sex structure of populations and not just their

size
model the components of demographic change - fertility,
mortality, and migration – and not just population growth.
The procedure for making cohort-component population projections
was developed by Whelpton in the 1930s. It can be thought of as
an elaboration of the ideas encapsulated in the demographic
balancing equation:

P(t+n)= P(t) + B(t) − D(t) + I(t) − E(t)

where:

P(t) is the population at time t

B(t) and D(t) are number of births and deaths occurring between t
and t+n.
I(t) and E(t) are the number of immigrants and of emigrants from
the country during the period t to t+n.

This equation reminds us that there are only two possible ways of
joining a population: one can be born into it or one can migrate
into it. Similarly, the only ways to leave a population are to
emigrate or to die. At the global level, nobody has joined the
human population by immigrating and only a few unfortunate
astronauts have emigrated and not returned.

Cohort-component projections extend this concept to individual

age cohorts. They make use of the fact that every year of time
that passes, every member of a population becomes a year older.
Thus, after 5 years the survivors of the cohort aged 0-4 years at
some baseline date will be aged 5-9 years, 5 years after that
they will aged 10-14 years, and so on.
Logistic Growth
If the human population had augmented at this rate since the
beginning of recorded history, it would now exceed all the known
matter in the universe. If a population cannot increase forever,
what changes in the population can we expect over time? One of
the first suggestions made about population growth is that it
would follow a smooth S-shaped curve known as the logistic curve.
A logistic population would increase exponentially only
temporarily. After that, the rate of growth would gradually
decline (i.e., the population would increase more slowly) until
 DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE, INC.
Juan dela Cruz Street, Toril, Davao City
Landline No. (082) 291 1882
Accredited by ACSCU-ACI

an upper limit, called the logistic carrying capacity, was

reached.
Although the logistic growth curve is an improvement over
the exponential, it too involves assumptions that are unrealistic
for humans and other mammals. Both the exponential and logistic
assume a constant environment and a homogeneous population—one in
which all individuals are identical in their effects on each
other. In addition to these two assumptions, logistics assumes a
constant carrying capacity, which is also unrealistic in most
cases, as we will discuss later. There is, in short, little
evidence that human populations—or any animal populations, for
that matter—follow this growth curve, for reasons that are
obvious if you think about all the things that can affect a
population.
Nevertheless, the logistic curve has been used for most
long-term forecasts of the size of human populations in specific
nations. As we said, this S-shaped curve first rises steeply
upward and then changes slope, curving toward the horizontal
carrying capacity. The point at which the curve changes is the
inflection point, and until a population has reached this point,
we cannot project its final logistic size. The human population
had not yet made the bend around the inflection point. Still,
forecasters typically dealt with this problem by assuming that
the population was just reaching the inflection point when
somehow the forecast is absolute. This standard practice
inevitably led to a great underestimate of the maximum
population.

Age Structure
As we noted earlier, the two standard methods for
forecasting human population growth—the exponential and the
logistic—ignore all characteristics of the environment and, in
that way, are seriously incomplete. A more comprehensive approach
would consider the effects of the supply of food, water, and
shelter; the prevalence of diseases; and other factors that can
affect birth and death rates. But with long-lived organisms like
us, these environmental factors have different effects on
different age groups. So, the next step is to find a way to
express how a population is divided among ages. It is known as
the population age structure, which is the proportion of the
population of each age group. The population's age structure
affects current and future birth rates, death rates, and growth
rates impacting the environment and impacting current and future
social and economic conditions. The pyramid age structure occurs
in a population with many young people and a high death rate at
each age—and therefore, it is a high birth rate, a rapidly
growing population, and a relatively short average lifetime
population. A column shape occurs where the birth rate and death
rate are low, and a high percentage of the population is elderly.
 DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE, INC.
Juan dela Cruz Street, Toril, Davao City
Landline No. (082) 291 1882
Accredited by ACSCU-ACI

A bulge occurs if some event in the past caused a high birth or

death rate for some age group but not others. An inverted pyramid
occurs when a population is older than younger people. The age
structure varies considerably by nation and provides insight into
a population's history, status, and likely future.

References:
R1:
https://www.insee.fr/en/metadonnees/definition/c1235#:~:text=A
%20population%20projection%20gives%20a,%3A%20fertility%2C
%20mortality%20and%20migration.
R2:
http://papp.iussp.org/sessions/papp101_s10/PAPP101_s10_010_010.ht
ml
R3: Hinde A (1998). Demographic Methods. (Chapters 12, section
12.4, 16 and 17). London: Arnold Publishers.
R4: Preston SH, Heuveline P and Guillot M (2001). Demography.
Measuring and Modelling Population Processes. (Chapter 6,
sections 6.1-6.3). Oxford: Blackwell.