Environmental risks, demographic dynamic and Life Quality: Argentina at beginning of XXI century

Abstract

In this work we analyze the relationship among: 1) Certain environmental risks: Flood problems, Earthquakes, Tornadoes and Soil degradation, 2) Demographic dynamics (inter census growth and migratory balances) and 3) Grade of Life Level Quality of Argentinian people. We use a Geographical Information System (GIS) in which we have done the digitalization of the respective layers of environmental risks. Following, we examine the information on demographic dynamics. At last, we present a synthetic index of the population’s Life Quality, which was elaborated starting from a combination of weighted indicators of environmental and socioeconomic dimensions (education, health and housing). The next step is to study the demographic behaviour and the grade of well-being of Argentina’s people different segments for each one of the environmental risks. We start from an operation of overlapping of different layers (for example: flood risk, growth rate, migration balance, etc). All previous stepladder let us size and compare the obtained Life Quality Index with Demographic Dynamics according to the degree of affectation of each one of the considered physical-environmental events. Finally we can establish the future scenario by projecting these phenomena impacts into the process of global environmental change.