Research Stories

Advances in paleoclimatology help a research team discover that European wars, famine, plagues and even human height were all driven by changes in climate.

Debate over the relationship between climate and human crisis has gone on for more than a century, and recent studies have shown significant temporal correlations between the two – but it was only with the publication in December of research led by the Faculty of Geography’s Professor David Zhang that the specific causal mechanisms underlying this relationship were properly analysed.

Advances in paleoclimatology enabled the extensive research team – who spread across the globe and covered multiple disciplines – to use temperature data and climate-driven economic variables to simulate the climate in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere between 1500 and 1800. They looked into every major conflict and crisis and correlated them to 14 economic, social, agricultural and demographic variables.

“Our findings indicate that climate change was the ultimate cause and climate-driven economic downturn was the direct cause of large-scale human crises in pre-industrial Europe and the Northern Hemisphere,” says Professor Zhang.

"Our findings indicate that climate change was the ultimate cause and climate-driven economic downturn was the direct cause of large scale human crisis in pre-industrial Europe and the Northern Hemisphere."

Professor David Zhang

The full version of this article was originally published in Bulletin. Please click here to view this HKU publication.