Sub-County Population Projections and Sea Level Rise in Coastal Georgia

Mathew Hauer, University of Georgia

Sub county population projections are generally very problematic. The inputs required for a traditional cohort-component method, are rarely available at sub county geographies. There are simple workarounds, such as the Hamilton-Perry method, but these techniques require areal units that are stable between two censuses in order to generate cohort-change ratios and are oftentimes only used to project populations along short projection horizons, namely 10 years. Understanding the implications of climate change requires additional understanding of coupled human-natural systems interactions. This paper proposes a new housing unit based population projection methodology for sub-county units that will be used in conjunction with sea-level rise modeling to project populations vulnerable to inundation by 2050 in coastal Georgia.