Does the environment matter? Depopulation in the Sudetes (case study of the Kłodzko region, SW Poland)

Highlights

• Relief, climate and soils are key natural drivers of migration and land abandonment.

• Natural factors explain 54% of depopulation but overlap socio-economic agents.

• Locally, socio-economic factors counteract the impact of environment on depopulation.

• Climate-depopulation relation is stationary, but the role of relief varies over space.

• Stable natural factors are of no less importance for depopulation than sudden events.

Abstract

Out-migration and the resulting depopulation are currently one of the distinct problems worldwide. The aim of this research was to evaluate the influence of environmental factors on depopulation. We considered natural agents with long-term, constant, or gradually changing impacts and discussed the possibility of decoupling the role of the environment from overlapping non-environmental factors. The research was conducted for the Kłodzko region in the Sudetes, a representative example of a depopulating peripheral mountain and border area in Central Europe. The methods included: comparative analysis from census data from the mid-19th century until the present, and regression-based spatial modeling. The key role of natural features was confirmed to strengthen the out-migration and land abandonment. However, separating the impact of environmental and socio-economic factors turned out to be hard to quantify. The environment can be perceived as a passive element of depopulation unless there is a change which activates the reaction chain and the equilibrium threshold is exceeded. The change might be within the environmental system itself, or it might be related to external drivers such as socio-economic, political, institutional, etc. transformations. In the latter case, the environment would react as a local modifier of external non-environmental processes.