In trying to come up with a method of evaluating the damage from pollution, I did not see a "demography" site or "population dynamics" site so I am not sure where else to ask this. What I would like to do is to extrapolate both human and economic factors to larger populations by also considering world-wide population density in different regions. In all my years within acedemia I have not encountered this method in any course nor any professor who specializes in such material enough to direct to these methods and information, so I have no idea what it might be called or where to look.
For instance, suppose a pollutant like mercury builds from factory runoff and mining activities and causes $x$ deaths per year in a specific community of a certain population density, a certain mercury density (PPB) and certain surface area. This will inevitably cause more deaths in more densely populated communities, and for the moment ignoring the additional environmental degradation, will potentially cause less deaths in less dense communities which experience the same or smaller PPB. Two approaches are to assume average uniform pollution density and uniform population density, or, to use two sets of densities, one for mercury concentration and one for population density.
It is feasible to obtain some information on the economic damage of mercury to specific communities of a certain density. In that case, I would like to extrapolate the results to create a theoretical estimate of the damage for other communities of varying densities over the world.
I anticipate in some way that I will need some double or triple integral method to integrate over the two densities, but I can't possibly be the first person to come up with such an concept, I am sure there must be some kind of convention or technique among demographers for doing density-dependent calculations.
