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A UNC Greensboro professor says new research on big climate disruptions from the past can help us understand how global warming could affect society in the future.
A study led by UNCG bio-archeologist Gwen Robbins Schug analyzed data collected over the past decade or so about climate incidents over the past 5,000 years. The work by a team of 25 scholars from around the world was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers found that past climate change has had the biggest negative impacts on urban societies that struggled to adapt. Societies that relied on agriculture were most at risk for violence and disease, she said. Conversely, smaller, interconnected rural communities were more resilient, because they relied more on hunting, fishing and smaller-scale farming, she said.
"We don't actually tend to see a lot of violence in the face of climate change in these populations in the past, unless they were already living in a situation where there was a lot of hierarchical social structure, socioeconomic inequality," Robbins Schug said in an interview. "And in that case, sometimes there have been violent outcomes from climate change. But those are the exception in the populations that we looked at, not the rule."
To reach those conclusions, Robbins Schug and her collaborators looked at data published about 37 archeological sites from the Americas, Europe and Asia. "We look at human skeletal remains and mummified remains from archaeological sites and we try to make inferences about human health and demography — so population statistics, fertility, mortality rates, that kind of thing," she said.
Robbins Schug said she first had the idea to look at past responses to climate change when she was doing research for her doctoral dissertation in India. She was studying a society that lived 3,000 to 3,500 years ago.
"They went through a period of environmental change that basically led most of the area that they lived in to be abandoned after a couple hundred years. At that point, they had to shift gears with their subsistence and they weren't able to do as much farming and produce cereals," she said.
When the climate became cooler and drier, farming became more difficult and infant mortality increased, she said.
Even though today's concern is global warming rather than cooling, Robbins Schug said periods of cooling were sometimes an issue.
"So there were quite a few times during the Holocene (Epoch) where there were these rapid climate change events. And typically what it meant was that there was a cooling and drying period, right?" she said. "And it seems like that would be opposite to the situation that we're facing today, where we have global warming and more rainfall in certain areas, or changing patterns of rainfall. But the thing about it is, it's not so much the direction of change that's the issue. It's the magnitude and the speed with which things changed, right? And drought, too, is something that we will face today."
Robbins Schug said she hopes that the study will help correct misconceptions about how we will react to rapid climate change.
"Humans (are) nothing if not also cooperative, right? We live in societies. We work together. Our species is not inherently violent. That's a misconception," she said.
She also said that violence, migration and societal collapse are not inevitable in the face of environmental change.
"In situations where rural livelihoods are supported through interconnectedness, through cooperation, you have people choosing to stay in their own communities during these climate change events. And we're seeing a lot of resilience in those communities," she said.
So the lesson is to support rural communities and adopt policies to reduce inequalities, Robbins Schug said.
"If we do support people who are living in these rural areas, if they have a way to make a living and can stay in their communities, there's less likely to be disease spillover," she said.
