Societal impacts of historical droughts in a warming world

Abstract

Global climate change has highlighted social and economic challenges associated with water deficits, particularly in regions where demands on freshwater exceed renewable supplies. In view of ongoing global warming, climate models project increased aridity in the twenty-first century over most of Africa, parts of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia, as well as the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Severe recent droughts in human-dominated environments-as experienced in California, Brazil, China, Spain, and Australia-can no longer be seen as purely natural hazards. These droughts have had devastating ecological and economic consequences and are expected to cause more damage by the end of the twenty-first century (Savelli et al. 2022). Moreover, such heat waves are projected to become more intense, more frequent, and longer lasting in a warmer climate (Cook et al. 2018).Drought research has a long history in both the natural and social sciences. Climatologists and hydrologists have made significant progress in understanding the physical processes that underlie droughts. At the same time, historians, economists, geographers, and sociologists have studied societal impacts and perceptions of droughts. However, these * Nicolas Maughan

Turbulence in Social Governance Processes: an Overview

“…Long-term droughts cause large-scale turbulence in agricultural societies (Maughan et al, 2022). Egyptian Pharaohs and Roman Emperors were held responsible for providing large granary storage for use in times of extended drought (Papazian, 2013;Cheung, 2021).…”

New perspectives on historical climatology

“…Recent scholarship has emphasized reconstruction and impacts of extreme precipitation events as well as temperature. A special issue of Climate of the Past (Brázdil et al, 2018) and special collection of Regional Environmental Change have highlighted gaps and progress in research on historical droughts (Maughan et al, 2022). This work features new methods for identifying exceptional drought seasons (Glaser & Kahle, 2020), new perspectives on vulnerability and adaptation (Gorostiza et al, 2021; Pribyl et al, 2019), and work on peculiar drought records such as rogation ceremonies (Tejedor et al, 2019) and “hunger stones” (Elleder et al, 2020).…”

Documentary evidence of urban droughts and their impact in the eastern Netherlands: the cases of Deventer and Zutphen, 1500–1795

“…al. 2014), can thus demonstrate a greater temporal diversity if more localised data is included in the analysis (Maughan et. al.…”