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Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change

Nature volume 591, pages 539–550 (2021)Cite this article

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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.

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Fig. 1: Variability and change in palaeoclimate reconstructions.
Fig. 2: Meta-analysis of HCS studies.
Fig. 3: A process for undertaking research into past climate–society dynamics.
Fig. 4: Palmer drought severity indices for the Low Countries and southeastern California.
Fig. 5: Tree ring reconstructions of temperature in France, and moisture in both France and China.
Fig. 6: Palaeoclimate moisture proxies for Iron Age southern Africa.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Georgetown Environment Initiative for providing support for the workshop that launched this project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative for fostering dialogue between co-authors at Georgetown University; and R. Hoffmann, J. Luterbacher, J. R. McNeill and S. White for comments and criticism. Audiences at the University of Arizona, Georgetown University, the University of Manitoba and the University of Texas at Austin provided comments that improved this article. K.A. acknowledges support from NSF grants CNH- 0908971 and CNH-1210360; K.K. acknowledges support from the Andrea von Braun Foundation; M.B. acknowledges support from the Volkswagen Foundation’s Freigeist Fellowship ‘The Dantean Anomaly’; and E.X. acknowledges support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) projects ClimXtreme/CROP and RegIKlim/NUKLEUS.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Dagomar Degroot, Jakob Burnham, Kathryn de Luna, Emma Moesswilde & Timothy Newfield

  2. School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Kevin Anchukaitis

  3. Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Kevin Anchukaitis

  4. Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig, Germany

    Martin Bauch

  5. School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London, London, UK

    Fred Carnegy

  6. Northwest Institute of Historical Environment and Socio-Economic Development, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China

    Jianxin Cui

  7. Institute of History and Political Sciences, University of Białystok, Białystok, Poland

    Piotr Guzowski

  8. Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    George Hambrecht

  9. Institute of History, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Heli Huhtamaa

  10. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Heli Huhtamaa

  11. Paleo-Science and History Independent Research Group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany

    Adam Izdebski

  12. Institute of History, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Krakow, Poland

    Adam Izdebski

  13. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Katrin Kleemann

  14. Department of History, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    Katrin Kleemann

  15. Department of Biology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Naresh Neupane & Timothy Newfield

  16. Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Qing Pei

  17. Department of Geography, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Elena Xoplaki

  18. Center for International Development and Environmental Research, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Elena Xoplaki

  19. Department of History, California State University Northridge, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Natale Zappia

  20. Institute for Sustainability, California State University Northridge, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Natale Zappia

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  1. Dagomar Degroot
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Contributions

D.D. designed the study, organized and attended the planning workshop, revised the case studies, wrote complete paper drafts, and created all tables and diagrams. K.A., M.B., J.B., K.d.L., K.K., T.N., E.X. and Q.P. attended the workshop and revised the study design. K.A. wrote sections on palaeoclimate and created all figures using climate reconstructions. E.M., N.N. K.A. and P.G. interpreted models and statistics. M.B., J.B., F.C., J.C., D.D., K.d.L., G.H., H.H., A.I., K.K., T.N., Q.P., E.X. and N.Z. contributed and revised case studies. K.A., D.D., K.d.L., G.H., H.H., A.I., K.K., T.N. and E.X. revised paper drafts.

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Correspondence to Dagomar Degroot.

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Peer review information Nature thanks Manon Bajard, Michael Frachetti, Markus Stoffel and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Figure 1, showing the geographical locations covered by our case studies, Supplementary Figures 2-4, which provide additional information about our case studies and our methods for developing and revising them, and Supplementary References.

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Degroot, D., Anchukaitis, K., Bauch, M. et al. Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change. Nature 591, 539–550 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03190-2

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