The 8th David Finney Lecture (2024)
Title: Very Long-Term Probabilistic Population Projections for Assessing the Social Cost of Carbon
Abstract: Assessment of the social cost of carbon relies on long-term forecasts of carbon emissions, which in turn depend on very long-range population and economic forecasts, to 2300. The traditional methods for population forecasting are deterministic using scenarios, but probabilistic forecasts are needed as inputs to the models of the social cost of carbon. In a significant breakthrough, since 2015, the United Nations has issued probabilistic population forecasts for all countries using a Bayesian methodology that was developed by our group. We extend the UN method to very-long range population forecasts by combining the statistical approach with expert review and elicitation. While total world population is projected to grow for most of the rest of this century, it will likely stabilize in the 22nd century and decline in the 23rd century.
Prof Adrian Raftery (University of Washington)
Adrian E. Raftery is Blumstein-Jordan Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Sociology at the at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and obtained a B.A. in Mathematics (1976) and an M.Sc. in Statistics and Operations Research (1977) at Trinity College Dublin. He obtained a doctorate in mathematical statistics in 1980 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France under the supervision of Paul Deheuvels. He was a lecturer in statistics at Trinity College Dublin from 1980 to 1986, and then an associate (1986-1990) and full (1990-2024) professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Washington. He was the founding Director of the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences (1999-2009).
Raftery has published over 240 articles in peer-reviewed statistical, sociological and other journals. His research focuses on Bayesian model selection and Bayesian model averaging, model-based clustering, inference for deterministic simulation models, and the development of new statistical methods for demography, sociology, and the environmental and health sciences.
He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected Member of the Sociological Research Association. He has won the Population Association of America's Clifford C. Clogg Award, the American Sociological Association's Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Distinguished Contribution to Knowledge, the Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, the Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation, and the Science Foundation Ireland St. Patrick's Day Medal. He is also a former Coordinating and Applications Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and a former Editor of Sociological Methodology. He was identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995-2005 by Thomson-ISI.
He is currently an associate editor, and Chair of the Statistical and Methodological Review Committee for PNAS, and a deputy editor of the journal Demography. Thirty-four students have obtained Ph.D.'s working under Raftery's supervision, of whom 21 hold or have held tenure-track university faculty positions. He has 165 academic descendants.
You can read more about David Finney as well as watch some of the previous lectures here.
The 8th David Finney Lecture (2024)
Yew Lecture Theatre, Nucleus Building, King's Buildings