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Global Climate Change, War, and Population Decline in Recent Human History

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Global Climate Change, War, and Population Decline in Recent Human History Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history David D. Zhang*†, Peter Brecke‡, Harry F. Lee*, Yuan-Qing He§, and Jane Zhang¶ *Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong; ‡Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0610; §Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Science, Lanzhou 730000, Gansu, China; and ¶Department of Anthropology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom Edited by Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved October 23, 2007 (received for review April 4, 2007) Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting of the periods of nationwide unrest, population collapse, and from climate change, the impacts of long-term climate change on dynastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period social unrest and population collapse have not been quantitatively (11–13). As a result of recent scientific breakthroughs in estab- investigated. In this study, high-resolution paleo-climatic data lishing more precise paleo-climatic records [see supporting have been used to explore at a macroscale the effects of climate information (SI) Text], we extend the earlier study to the global change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the and continental levels between A.D. 1400 and A.D. 1900, during preindustrial era. We show that long-term fluctuations of war the Little Ice Age (LIA; see SI Text). frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temper- The hypothesis we propose posits that long-term climate ature change. Further analyses show that cooling impeded agri- change has significant direct effects on land-carrying capacity (as cultural production, which brought about a series of serious social measured by agricultural production). Fluctuation of the carry- problems, including price inflation, then successively war out- ing capacity in turn affects the food supply per capita. A shortage break, famine, and population decline successively. The findings of food resources in populated areas increases the likelihood of suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war–peace, population, armed conflicts, famines, and epidemics, events that thus reduce and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by population size. As a feedback mechanism, population decline long-term climate change. The findings also imply that social has a dominant tendency to increase the food supply per capita mechanisms that might mitigate the impact of climate change were (seen in decreasing food prices), which results in relative peace not significantly effective during the study period. Climate change and fast population growth. The interactions among these may thus have played a more important role and imposed a wider components in a social system create an important rhythm of ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been sug- macrohistory in agricultural societies. The simplified pathways gested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension of the above chain reactions and feedback loops are represented to the classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism. in SI Fig. 3. With respect to the character of the causal pathways, the agricultural production ͉ population collapse ͉ price ͉ war–peace cycles ͉ relation between climate and agricultural production has been preindustrial era demonstrated by many empirical studies (10, 14). Under eco- logical stress, adaptive choices for animal species are the reduc- tion of population size, migration, and dietary change. Depop- cientists have noted that social activities heavily depend on ulation typically takes place through starvation and cannibalism. climate. They have also pointed out that temperature prob- S Humans have more pathways, social mechanisms, to adapt to ably influences our lives more than any other climatic factor and climate change and mitigate ecological stress. Besides migration, human society is especially vulnerable to large, long-term tem- they include warfare, economic change, innovation, trade, and perature changes (1). However, scientific research on the social peaceful resource redistribution. We believe that in late agrarian effects of climate change has tended to focus on the economic society established political boundaries in populated areas lim- costs of current and future climate change and has neglected the ited mass migration; the result of such mass migration, when it study of how societies have historically reacted to long-term occurred, often was war. Economic change was a costly and slow climate change. This neglect is unfortunate because a better process that involved changing cultures, technologies, and habits. understanding of how past climatic changes have influenced When the speed of human innovation and its transfer were not human society may help us better understand our future fast enough to keep pace with rapid ecological change, famine prospects. and disease became difficult to avoid. Trade and redistribution Recently, important attempts have been made to use high- under the condition of shrinking resources would not help much resolution, reconstructed paleo-climatic data to elucidate indi- because the ecological stress was at a global or very large vidual cases of prehistoric cultural/population collapses caused regional scale. Finally, human social development in the form of by agricultural failure in the Middle East, United States, and international and national institutions was not strong enough to China (2–4). Webster (5) pointed out that warfare was an buffer the tensions caused by food resource scarcity. Therefore, adaptive ecological choice in prehistoric societies with limited war and population decline became common consequences of resources and growing populations, although he was not able to use systematic, scientific data to support his conclusion. The concept of environmental conflict has been suggested by several Author contributions: D.D.Z. designed research; D.D.Z., P.B., H.F.L., Y.-Q.H., and J.Z. per- researchers, but they focus only on conflicts caused by short- formed research; D.D.Z., P.B., H.F.L., Y.-Q.H., and J.Z. analyzed data; and D.D.Z. and H.F.L. term climate variations and meteorological events (6–9). Gal- wrote the paper. loway (10) found that long-term climate change controlled The authors declare no conflict of interest. population size in middle-latitude areas. However, his finding This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. lacked quantitative precision because of the absence of high- Freely available online through the PNAS open access option. resolution climate records at the time. We studied a long span †To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]. of Chinese history and found that the number of war outbreaks This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/ and population collapses in China is significantly correlated with 0703073104/DC1. Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature variations and that all © 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA 19214–19219 ͉ PNAS ͉ December 4, 2007 ͉ vol. 104 ͉ no. 49 www.pnas.org͞cgi͞doi͞10.1073͞pnas.0703073104 Downloaded by guest on October 2, 2021 climate-induced ecological stress in the late preindustrial era. Recent developments in resource and environmental studies (e.g., refs. 8, 9, 15, and 16) suggest that limited resources and environmental degradation would have caused armed conflicts in human history. However, these perceived climate–war– population decline sequences have never been substantiated with scientific evidence consisting of long-term time series. In the following sections, we verify our hypothesis and evaluate the role of climate change on war outbreak and population decline with empirical data at global and continental scales. Results and Discussion We adopted a quantitative and macrohistorical approach to explore the climate–agriculture–war–population relationships depicted in SI Fig. 3 in the preindustrial era. Statistical methods were used to examine the correlations among the various components in the pathways. The various relationships between different factors between the pathways were more thoroughly analyzed with the two regions for which there are more data, Europe and China. Cyclic Patterns of Wars and Temperature Changes. In the same manner as the NH temperature variations, the incidence of warfare in the NH, Europe, Asia, and the arid areas of the NH (i.e., the arid zone from Eurasia to North Africa; see SI Fig. 4) in A.D. 1400–1900 tends to follow a cyclic pattern with a turbulent period followed by a relatively tranquil one (Fig. 1 A and B). Two periods plagued by unrest and warfare and three relatively peaceful periods follow the temperature undulation inversely. This pattern not only appears at a continental scale, but also in three war databases with different violence thresholds at a global scale (Fig. 1C), except for the late 19th century when the temperature of the Southern Hemisphere (SH) was its coldest in the last millennium (17) and a great number of wars occurred in the southern part of Africa.ʈ In short, synchronous periods of relative peace and turbulence during those 500 years were a global phenomenon seemingly linked to temperature change. To look at the severity of these wars and their impacts on human population, a NH fatality index for A.D. 1400–1900 was calculated from the wars with a known fatality record aggregated into 50-year intervals (see Fig. 1D and SI Text). The two peaks of the fatality index appear in the cold 17th and the early 19th centuries. Two of the greatest population declines since A.D. 1400 coincided with the two peaks. We note that the turning points of war/peace cycles in the NH Fig. 1. Paleo-temperature variation, war frequency, and population growth at the ends of the 17th and 18th centuries are different from the rate, A.D. 1400–1900. (A) Temperature anomaly (°C) in the NH that is turning points of the two longest mild/cold periods in the smoothed by 40-year Butterworth low pass filter (17).
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