Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change

Dagomar Degroot (), Kevin Anchukaitis, Martin Bauch, Jakob Burnham, Fred Carnegy, Jianxin Cui, Kathryn de Luna, Piotr Guzowski, George Hambrecht, Heli Huhtamaa, Adam Izdebski, Katrin Kleemann, Emma Moesswilde, Naresh Neupane, Timothy Newfield, Qing Pei, Elena Xoplaki and Natale Zappia
Additional contact information
Dagomar Degroot: Georgetown University
Kevin Anchukaitis: University of Arizona
Martin Bauch: Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe
Jakob Burnham: Georgetown University
Fred Carnegy: University College London
Jianxin Cui: Shaanxi Normal University
Kathryn de Luna: Georgetown University
Piotr Guzowski: University of Białystok
George Hambrecht: University of Maryland
Heli Huhtamaa: University of Bern
Adam Izdebski: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Katrin Kleemann: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich
Emma Moesswilde: Georgetown University
Naresh Neupane: Georgetown University
Timothy Newfield: Georgetown University
Qing Pei: The Education University of Hong Kong
Elena Xoplaki: Justus Liebig University Giessen
Natale Zappia: California State University Northridge

Nature, 2021, vol. 591, issue 7851, 539-550

Abstract: Abstract A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among human societies. This scholarship, which we term the ‘history of climate and society’ (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate–society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived—and often thrived—in the face of climatic pressures.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03190-2

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