After the long separation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, let’s finally meet again this year in Shanghai!

Building on the success of hosting the first two Asian Population Forum (APF) in 2016 and 2019 and the Fourth Conference of Asian Population Association (APA) in 2018, the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) at Shanghai University is organizing the Third Asian Population Forum on October 31-November 1, 2023, in Shanghai, China. This Forum will be jointly held by ADRI and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and supported by the Natural Sciences Foundation of China (NSFC). The theme is Population Projections for Socioeconomic, Environmental, and Climate Change Analysis.

The Asian Population Forum is one of the main platforms of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis to exchange research ideas and experiences of its collaborating institutes in comparative analysis of population and development issues across Asia. The Asian MetaCentre was established in 2000 as a regional center of excellence in population research. In collaboration with the Asia MetaCentre’s principal investigators at IIASA, the National University of Singapore, and Chulalongkorn University, ADRI has served as the headquarters of the Asian MetaCentre since 2016. At the first two APFs, the member institutes of the Asian MetaCentre jointly defined directions and the most important research areas for collaborative studies under the framework of the Asian MetaCentre. Accordingly, ADRI organized a series of research and training workshops and summer schools to foster collaborative and comparative analysis on topics including subnational population and human capital projections, internal migration, and socioecological consequences of international migrations. The third APF will review the progress of the joint research projects, share research findings, and explore topics and directions for further collaborations.

The Third APF focuses primarily on demographic projections and their applications to socioeconomic, environmental, and climate change assessments, policy analysis, and scenario development. It draws on recent advances in demographic methods, models, and tools for projecting population growth, changes in population compositions by age, sex, education, rural-urban residence, household structure, and spatial distributions. Multidimensional and multiscale demographic projections using enhanced methods and data sources have greatly improved our understanding of global, national, local, and spatial demographic prospects. They produce enriched data and references to inform scientific research, socioeconomic planning, and environmental and climate change assessment. These achievements and requirements were perfectly reflected in the Second Scenarios Forum of the global climate change research communities hosted by IIASA in 2022. The Scenarios Forum’s sessions on population, led by ADRI and IIASA researchers, addressed the critical needs of demographic projections for using and developing scenarios in climate change and sustainability analysis. The Third Asian Population Forum will further discuss needs and demonstrate progress, including extending global climate change socioeconomic scenarios – the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) to national and subnational levels, based on their socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental contexts. It will also explore improving assumptions about future demographic trends (fertility, mortality, and migration) and their interactions with energy consumption, water and land use, ecosystem services, and human settlements, under recent socioeconomic and institutional settings and changing environmental and climate conditions. Population projections for Asia are crucial as they serve as a fundamental tool for policymakers, researchers, and planners to anticipate and address the region's future demographic challenges, economic development needs, and environmental sustainability in a rapidly changing world.

In line with the theme of the Third APF, ADRI will host a training workshop on "Multidimensional and Multiscale Demographic Modeling for Environmental and Climate Change Scenario Development" on Oct. 25-30, 2023, in collaboration with IIASA and the Population Council. The workshop will introduce how demographic scenarios are developed under the SSPs framework, and how assumptions on future trends in fertility, mortality, migration, and urbanization are made for the SSPs at global and local levels. IIASA's Human Capital Projection Model and the Population Council’s Community Demographic Model (CDM, with four components: Urbanization Projection Model, Multiregional Population Projection Model, Household Projection Model, and Downscaling Model) will be taught at the workshop. Participants will learn to use those models to make SSP-consistent projections of changes in population sizes and compositions by age, sex, education, rural-urban residence, ethnicity, and household structure, across global, national, local, and spatial levels. Leiwen Jiang, Samir KC, Anne Goujon, Hamidreza Zoraghein, and Dilek Yildiz from ADRI, IIASA, and the Population Council will serve as instructors.

Please submit your paper for the Forum, your request to attend the training workshop, along with a CV and intention letter to lvsiying@shu.edu.cn by September 20, 2023. Applicants for the training workshop please indicate your experience in demographic projection and scenario use, as well as your familiarity with R and Python programs, although they are not prerequisites. Limited financial support is available for authors of selected papers and workshop participants on a competitive basis. The acceptance of papers and funding applications will be notified by September 30, 2023. Participants as observers are also welcome.