Societal Impacts of Historical Droughts in a Warming World

2018

The use of documentary evidence to investigate past climatic trends and events has become a recognised approach in recent decades. This contribution presents the state of the art in its application to droughts. The range of documentary evidence is very wide, including general annals, chronicles, memoirs and diaries kept by missionaries, travellers and those specifically interested in the weather; records kept by administrators tasked with keeping accounts and other financial and economic records; legal-administrative evidence; religious sources; letters; songs; newspapers and journals; pictographic evidence; chronograms; epigraphic evidence; early instrumental observations; society commentaries; and compilations and books. These are available from many parts of the world. This variety of documentary information is evaluated with respect to the reconstruction of hydroclimatic conditions (precipitation, drought frequency and drought indices). Documentary-based drought reconstructions are then addressed in terms of long-term spatiotemporal fluctuations, major drought events, relationships with external forcing and large-scale climate drivers, socioeconomic impacts and human responses. Documentarybased drought series are also considered from the viewpoint of spatio-temporal variability for certain continents, and their employment together with hydroclimate reconstructions from other proxies (in particular tree rings) is discussed. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and challenges for the future use of documentary evidence in the study of droughts are presented.

2016

Drought has been a threat to human existence throughout history. Today, as in the past, drought alters the course of civilizations. It is not merely a physical phenomenon, but the result of an interplay between a natural event (precipitation deficiencies due to natural climatic variability on varying timescales) and the demand placed on water supply by human-use systems. Extended periods of drought have resulted in significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, including food supply disruptions, famine, massive soil erosion, migrations of people, and wars. Human activities often exacerbate the impacts of drought (e.g., the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains, the Sahelian drought of the early 1970s). This trend appears to be accelerating because of the increasing demand being placed on local and regional water resources as a result of the earth's rapidly expanding population. Recent droughts in developing and developed countries and the concomitant impacts and personal hardships that resulted have underscored the vulnerability of all societies to this natural hazard. It is difficult to determine whether it is the frequency of drought that is increasing, or simply societal vulnerability to it.

EGUGA, 2019

Climate of The Past, 2020

The present article deals with the reconstruction of drought time series in Germany since 1500. The reconstructions are based on historical records from the virtual research environment Tambora (tambora.org, 2018) and official instrumental records. The historical records and recent data were related to each other through modern index calculations, drought categories and their historical equivalents. Historical and modern written documents are also taken into account to analyze the climatic effects and consequences on the environment and society. These pathways of effects are derived and combined with different drought categories. The derived historical precipitation index (HPI) is correlated with the standardized precipitation index (SPI). Finally, a historical drought index (HDI) and a historical wet index (HWI) are derived from the basic monthly precipitation index (PI) from 1500 onward. Both are combined for the historical humidity index (HHI). On this basis, the long-term development of dryness and drought in Germany since 1500, as well as medium-term deviations of drier and wetter periods and individual extreme events, is presented and discussed.

Climate of the Past Discussions, 2019

Extreme droughts are weather phenomena of considerable importance, involving significant environmental and societal impacts. While those that have occurred in the comparatively recent period of instrumental measurement are identified and dated on the basis of systematic, machine-standardised meteorological and hydrological observations, droughts that took place in the 25 pre-instrumental period are usually described only through the medium of documentary evidence. The extreme drought of 1842 in Europe presents a case in which information from documentary data can be combined with systematic instrumental observations. Seasonal, gridded European precipitation totals are used herein to describe general DJF, MAM and JJA precipitation patterns. Annual variations in monthly temperatures and precipitation at individual stations are expressed 30 with respect to a 1961-1990 reference period, supplemented by calculation of selected drought indices (SPI-1, SPEI-1 and Z-index). The mean circulation patterns during the driest months are elucidated by means of SLP maps, NAO and CEZI indices. Generally drier patterns in 1842 prevailed in January-February and at various intensities between April and August. The driest patterns in 1842 occurred in a broad zonal belt extending from France to eastern central Europe. A 35 range of documentary data is used to describe the peculiarities of agricultural, hydrological and socio-economic droughts, with particular attention to environmental and societal impacts and human responses to them. Although overall grain yields were not very strongly influenced, a particularly bad hay harvest, no aftermath (hay from a second cut), and low potato yields led to severe problems, especially for those who raised cattle. Finally, the 1842 drought is discussed in 40 terms of long-term drought variability, European tree-ring-based scPDSI reconstruction, and the broader context of societal impacts. 1 Introduction Dry events, generally caused by reductions in precipitation totals compared to normal climatic 45 conditions in a given area (meteorological drought), do not usually have such immediate and dramatic consequences (e.g. immediate loss of human lives, material damage) as might result from other hydrometeorological extremes -torrential rain, hailstorms, windstorms, floods, etc. The impacts of droughts appear over time, with some delay in the case of meteorological drought and progressively in agriculture (agricultural drought), water resources (hydrological and underground 50 water drought), and society (socio-economic drought) (

2007

Severe droughts in the middle-12th and late-13th centuries appear to have affected Anasazi (pre-Columbian Native American) populations. During the first drought most of the great houses in the central San Juan Basin were vacated; the second drought resulted in the abandonment of the Four Corners region. During the first drought, villages may not have been completely abandoned. The multi-year drought periods probably were characterized by reductions in both winter and summer precipitation. Maize is dependent on winter precipitation for its germination and initial growth and on summer (monsoonal) precipitation for its continued growth. Reductions in precipitation are hypothesized to have resulted in low yields of maize, the dietary staple of the Anasazi. A comparison of historic climate data and tree-ring-based reconstructions of precipitation in the Four Corners region with tree-ring-based reconstructions of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillat...

2019

This study presents a new epistemological analysis of drought chronology through a well-defined methodology for reconstructing past drought series, as well as series of other associated ecological and societal impact variables. Instead of building a grading system based on mixed criteria, this method facilitates transparency in the reconstruction process and enables the statistical examination of all variables when building series. The data for the present study are derived mainly from the REACHES (Reconstructed East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series) database; however, other archival documentary and index data from independent sources are also applied to understand drought narratives and to cross-check and validate the analysis derived from REACHES. From the time series analysis, six severe drought periods are identified in the Qing dynasty, and then a spatial analysis is performed to demonstrate the spatial distribution of drought and other variables in the six periods, as well as a social network analysis to reveal connections between drought and other ecological and societal variables. Research results clearly illustrate the role of human intervention in influencing the impacts of drought and their societal consequences. Particularly, the correlation between drought and socioeconomic turmoil is not strong; crop failure and famine are important intermediate factors, while ecological factors such as locust and disaster relief measures are all imperative to intervene between crop production and famine. Implications of the study on drought impact are provided, as well as the significance of drought on historical climate reconstruction studies.

Water and Society from Ancient Times to the Present: Resilience, Decline, and Revival, 2018

Climate sensitivity assessment, the methodological approach introduced in this chapter, is new to archaeology inquiry. Sensitivity assessment is part of the worldwide effort to improve understanding of current climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability (e.g. McCarthy et al., 2001; IPCC, 2014). '[Climate change] Sensitivity is the degree to which a system is affected, either adversely or beneficially, by climate-related stimuli' (McCarthy et al., 2001: 21). Sensitivity studies 'attempt to identify climate-sensitive groups, activi ties and areas, linking them to the varied levels of climate extremes' (Kates, 1985: 16; see Maunder and Ausubel. 1985 and Warrick, 1980 for examples). The multidisciplinary study of human sensitivity to climate extremes contrib utes to climate impact assessments (e.g. Kates, 1985) and is integral to local to global-scale efforts to prepare for the projected effects of global warming (IPCC, 2014). The goal of this chapter is to share with archaeologists and those interested in climatic influences on human behaviour a method of assessing human sensi tivity to climate extremes (e.g. droughts, pluvials, warm and cool periods). The method is appropriate for any region with long-term archaeological settlement data and high-resolution palaeoclimatic data. ft is my hope that archaeologists will conduct similar analyses in their region of interest and communicate the results to policy makers and investigators of human vulnerability and resilience to climate extremes. Archaeologists investigate the long-term dynamics and drivers of change and stability in human-environment interactions and social and ecological (or 'natural') systems (Fisher and Feinman, 2005; van der Leeuw and Redman, 2002; Nelson et al., 2012). Contemporary climate impact stud ies that do not consider the long-term may have practical consequences for policy makers and the public, such as the failure to direct adaptation and miti gation resources to people and places with long-term vulnerability to climate extremes. Likewise, the knowledge that can be gained from identifying long term human resilience to climate extremes can be lost if this resilience is not identified and investigated. Policy makers and planners preparing adaptation and mitigation strategies for a warming world and archaeologists investigating historical trajectories may rely on 'common sense' assumptions that lack empirical support (Ingram, 2010).

Historical Climatology

Scientific Data, 2021

Climate proxy data are required for improved understanding of climate variability and change in the pre-instrumental period. We present the first international initiative to compile and share information on pro pluvia rogation ceremonies, which is a well-studied proxy of agricultural drought. Currently, the database has more than 3500 dates of celebration of rogation ceremonies, providing information for 153 locations across 11 countries spanning the period from 1333 to 1949. This product provides data for better understanding of the pre-instrumental drought variability, validating natural proxies and model simulations, and multi-proxy rainfall reconstructions, amongst other climatic exercises. the database is freely available and can be easily accessed and visualized via http://inpro.unizar.es/.