Hydrangea
On the Brink

To Do
The goal here is to forestall environmental disaster. Tasks:

  1. Find the Aid Package that yields a sustained environment with the least damage to people.
  2. Find the minimum aid necessary to avoid any permanent environmental damage (yellow desert encroaching at the top of the resource map).
  3. Optional : Using your best aid package, try turning capacity effects off. Is your aid package still good for the people?

Discussion
Hydrangea has made magnificent progress! Twenty-five years ago, this country was in similar straits to Wisteria. But fertility rates have halved. Mortality is down. Infant mortality is a third of Wisteria's. Hydrangea is accomplishing its "demographic transition" from high birth and death rates, to low birth and death rates. You can see this on the population pyramids. Note how the Hydrangea pyramid above age 15-20 has much the same shape as all of Wisteria's pyramid.


Wisteria
Hydrangea
But Hydrangea has run out of time to complete its demographic transition. It is already drawing on 87% of all available resources to support its population. In this scenario, capacity effects are turned on. In the very next step, irreparable land damage from overexploitation begins to set in.

In Hydrangea, don't watch the death toll. The easiest way to lower the death toll is to destroy the environment, thus lose most of the population. After that, fewer people die. But no one would call this a good solution. Here, you want to keep your eye on minimizing the land that's permanently destroyed, and keeping the population growing or shrinking smoothly, instead of overcorrecting via catastrophic die-offs. With a larger, healthy and sustainable population, the death toll will actually be higher than in the No-Aid scenario.

The best solution for people and environment that I've found, uses only about 5 points of aid per step, to stretch it out further, and changes aid mix along the way. Your two key tools are to reduce the birthrate (not much further!) and to increase agricultural productivity. If you cut the birthrates too far, the population goes into a rather unrealistic decline.

Hydrangea's demographic data (population, fertility, and mortality, by age and sex) are composited from Ecuador and Bangladesh. These countries have undergone the transition described in the first paragraph (fertility rates halved, etc.) in the past 25 years. There were many countries to choose from which roughly fit that description. I chose an intermediate developing Asian + Latin American composite, to go with Wisteria's underdeveloped Middle East + African composite. Hydrangea's initial capacity was set "on the brink", and is not based on any particular country.

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