How human communities have adapted throughout history

According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the global average temperature in 2024 will almost certainly exceed the limit of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average temperature as set in the Paris Climate Agreement for the first ever time.

Against this backdrop, researchers from the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Heidelberg University and the University of Cambridge (UK) are calling for better research into the resilience of human societies to a changing climate.

In a review article now published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the interdisciplinary team from geosciences and archaeology discusses important findings on climate resilience over the past 5,000 years. At the same time, the authors emphasize the existing knowledge gaps and identify potential new research approaches.

“We wanted to understand how societies were able to remain stable, resilient or even prosperous despite the climate risks. The aim is to derive sustainable strategies for the future from past successes and failures, even if the current human-induced climate change is far greater in scale than the pre-industrial climate changes of the past 5,000 years,” states first author Dr. Liang Emlyn Yang from the LMU, who is a former member of the Kiel Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” and of ROOTS.

In their study, the researchers show examples of historical adaptation to climatic challenges, starting with early hunter–gatherer communities through to industrialized societies. “The study demonstrates that as societies become increasingly technologized, people’s ability to adapt also increases,” explains co-author Dr. Mara Weinelt, scientific coordinator of ROOTS. At the same time, industrialization has led to major economic differences around the world, resulting in very different levels of resilience or vulnerability to climate risks.

Even though numerous examples of the resilience of human communities to climate change at different geographical scales and historical contexts are already known, the authors of the article emphasize the great need for additional research. They propose the development of a new scientific field of “Climate Resiliology,” which should incorporate historical and archaeological findings in order to develop resilience strategies for our present and future.

“This is only achievable if different scientific disciplines work closely together to understand the complex interrelationships of resilience across time and space,” says Weinelt.

The article is also the editorial introduction to the thematic focus “Social Resilience to Climate Changes Over the Past 5000 Years” in Environmental Research Letters. The focus aims to understand different cases, manifestations and changes in social resilience to climate and environmental impacts from prehistoric, historical and contemporary, local and global perspectives, as well as from theoretical, empirical and quantitative modeling perspectives.