Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change

DOI
Publisher DOI
PubMed ID
33762769
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. This Review proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching climate–society interactions that focuses on the mechanisms through which climate change has influenced societies, and the uncertainties of discerning this influence across different spatiotemporal scales.
Date Issued
2021-03-24
Publication Type
Article
Subject(s)
Language(s)
en
Author(s)
Degroot, Dagomar
Anchukaitis, Kevin
Bauch, Martin
Burnham, Jakob
Carnegy, Fred
Cui, Jianxin
de Luna, Kathryn
Guzowski, Piotr
Hambrecht, George
Izdebski, Adam
Kleemann, Katrin
Moesswilde, Emma
Neupane, Naresh
Newfield, Timothy
Pei, Qing
Xoplaki, Elena
Zappia, Natale
Additional Credits
Journal
Nature
Publisher
Springer Nature
ISSN
1476-4687
Access(Rights)
restricted
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