Insights from past millennia into climatic impacts on human health and survival

Abstract

Climate change poses threats to human health, safety, and survival via weather extremes and climatic impacts on food yields, fresh water, infectious diseases, conflict, and displacement. Paradoxically, these risks to health are neither widely nor fully recognized. Historical experiences of diverse societies experiencing climatic changes, spanning multicentury to single-year duration, provide insights into population health vulnerability--even though most climatic changes were considerably less than those anticipated this century and beyond. Historical experience indicates the following. (i) Long-term climate changes have often destabilized civilizations, typically via food shortages, consequent hunger, disease, and unrest. (ii) Medium-term climatic adversity has frequently caused similar health, social, and sometimes political consequences. (iii) Infectious disease epidemics have often occurred in association with briefer episodes of temperature shifts, food shortages, impoverishment, and social disruption. (iv) Societies have often learnt to cope (despite hardship for some groups) with recurring shorter-term (decadal to multiyear) regional climatic cycles (e.g., El Niño Southern Oscillation)--except when extreme phases occur. (v) The drought-famine-starvation nexus has been the main, recurring, serious threat to health. Warming this century is not only likely to greatly exceed the Holocene's natural multidecadal temperature fluctuations but to occur faster. Along with greater climatic variability, models project an increased geographic range and severity of droughts. Modern societies, although larger, better resourced, and more interconnected than past societies, are less flexible, more infrastructure-dependent, densely populated, and hence are vulnerable. Adverse historical climate-related health experiences underscore the case for abating human-induced climate change.

Fig. 1.

Variations in northern hemisphere temperature, °C (relative to mean temperature during 1960–1980), averaged from multiple sources published since 2007. Averaging of hemispheric temperature is therefore only indicative. During early–mid Holocene (11–4 thousand years before present), for example, trends in regional temperatures differed, including prolonged cooling of much tropical ocean while warming for over 2 millennia in parts of Europe, China, and Scandinavia (4). Sources for graph include refs. –.

Fig. 2.

Selected examples (spanning 12 millennia) of impacts of climate changes, both short-term and long-term, on human health, safety, and survival.