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Environmental Opportunities and Limits for Development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Reid A. Bryson
Reid A. Bryson
Affiliation:
Emeritus Professor of Meteorology, of Geography, and of Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin Center for Climatic Research, Institute for Environmental Studies, 1225 W. Dayton Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
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Extract

Let us return to people and food, and another simple equation. The number of people per hectare of arable land, calculated over large regions, looks like a climatic distribution. I guessed at the form of the equation, calculated what the population per arable hectare was on the basis of climate, and compared it with the situation as observed. The correlation between them is 0.998. (See Fig. 8.) It is an almost perfect relationship. The equation relates population per arable hectare to rainfall and temperature, and ultimately to sunlight and water. If one enters Fig. 9, which is a graph of the equation, with the temperature, and finds the intersection with the appropriate rainfall curve, one can see how many people are currently fed from an arable hectare.

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 299 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1989

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References

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