RDMed

Project title: Resilience and Adaptation to Droughts and Extreme Climate Events in the Mediterranean: Lessons Learnt from Past on a 1.5°Cor more Warmer World

Topics: Mediterranean area, water stress, environmental datasets, socio-ecosystems

Concerned disciplinary fields: climatology, archaeology, history, ecology, economics, geography, agronomy, geosciences

Summary: The goal of the project is to analyze the environmental and socio-economic factors, which have made past Mediterranean societies more or less resilient or capable of adapting to the type of water stress that we are likely to encounter in the 21st century with a world warmer by 1.5°C or more, i.e.the thresholds of the Paris Agreement of December 2015.  The future will not resemble the past, but the past can shed light on it, by replacing the present warming in a long-term historical perspective and developing and testing a robust modeling approach. By integrating climate reconstructions over the last millennia with archaeological, historical, and environmental datasets, the project will evaluate the impact of climate variability on the feedback cycles between societies and their environments. This means understanding, at century to millennial timescales, the main features of the interplay between climate, ecosystem services, crop yields, productivity, population migrations, human settlement, and the emergence of a network of social and trade interdependencies. Focusing on environmental changes analogous to some of those predicted for the coming century, we would identify societal factors that affect resilience and vulnerability. In the past few millennia, there is several regions and periods with environmental changes correlated with societal disruptions. Among them, interesting cases are the end of the Bronze Age, 3200 years ago, in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the transition between the Iron age and the Roman period in the western Mediterranean basin. Analyzing these periods and comparing them with a more recent one, from the Modern time, helps to understand in which way the complexification of the societies modifies their vulnerability and resilience capacity

Project interlocutor: Joël Guiot, Cerege (UM 34)

Project duration: 06/01/2018 – 05/31/2021

Call for application: Interdisciplinarité 2016

Photography credits: Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

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