Date of Completion

2025

Document Type

Honors College Thesis

Department

Environmental Sciences

Thesis Type

College of Arts and Science Honors, Honors College

First Advisor

Brian Beckage PhD

Second Advisor

Greta Savitsky

Keywords

system dynamics, climate change, human behavior

Abstract

2024 marks the hottest year on record with the average global temperature exceeding 1.5ºC greater than the pre-industrial era. A 1.5ºC temperature threshold was established in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement as a tipping point, above which may result in a reduction of available natural resources and population size, and has since been used as a baseline for climate related policy. This record breaking year can be explained by the over consumption of fossil fuels and subsequent increases in atmospheric CO2 and surface temperature year over year. Particularly, this threshold breach raises the question: is our society at a critical climate tipping point? In this paper, I use an integrated social-ecological model to quantify the impact of climate change on human population dynamics as it pertains to fossil fuel usage and how climate change impacts the regeneration of natural resources. The model expands upon Motesharrei et al. (2014)’s Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model of societal sustainability and investigates the role of niche breadth and carbon intensity on natural resource regeneration and human population dynamics through the integration of a simple climate model. Lenton (2000)’s climate model measures temperature change as a result of changing atmospheric carbon levels. Model results show that population dynamics are heavily reliant on the availability of natural resources, which are impacted by carbon intensity. Additionally, there is a correlation between the vegetation resilience to temperature and human population size. These findings support the implementation of policy that uses renewable resources to generate societal wealth.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Available for download on Friday, May 01, 2026

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