Historical case studies of climate change impacts and the resulting social responses can provide analogies for better understanding the impacts of current and future climate changes.Around the turn of the 19th century,the climate of the North China Plain experienced a shift from a relatively warm stage in the 18th century to a colder stage in the 19th century,which was characterised by a much colder climate and more frequent and severe floods and droughts.Historical information about refugees,social disorder,grain transportation,and disaster relief on the North China Plain in 1780-1819 is collected from the Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty(a collection of official records).The mechanism of climate change affecting the food security of the society,as indicated by the development of a refugee problem around the turn of the 19th century,is analyzed by examining the social vulnerability.There are four basic findings:(1) In the 40 years from 1780-1819,the society on the North China Plain was unstable and characterised by a significant deterioration of the refugee situation.The number of refugees increased markedly,and their behaviour became increasingly violent.In the 1780s,most of the disaster victims chose to stay at their residences waiting for relief.From 1790 to 1800,hundreds of thousands of refugees migrated to northeast China.In the 1810s,the frequency of farmer rebellions increased sharply.(2) The increase in instability corresponded to the climatic cooling over the same time period.The increased instability was a result of the negative impacts of climate change accumulating and transmitting to the social level.(3) For food security,a precondition for the negative impacts of climate change on human society was the vulnerability of the regional socioeconomic system,which had a high sensitivity and low capacity to respond.This vulnerability could be described by the following three observations:① The regional balance of supply and demand for food was in a critical state,which led to a high sensitivity and
The occurrence of bumper or poor grain harvests in ancient China plays an important role in explaining how past climate changes affected the economy.Because of the lack of long-term continuous and high-resolution quantitative data for reconstructing the series of grain harvests in ancient China,understanding of the impacts and mechanisms involved in climate change is limited.This study presents a method designed for reconstructing grain harvest series by quantifying grain output levels based on the descriptions in historical documents.The method involves setting the grain output level for each year based on very specific meanings of different words,calculating a yield index based on the structure of each level and assessing grain yields(bumper or poor harvests)every 10 years.First,1636 records related to grain yields(including crop yields,food security,agricultural disasters,grain prices,grain storage and people's livelihoods)for each year were retrieved from history books called the Twenty-Four Histories.Second,using this method,a 10-year resolution graded grain harvest series from the Western Han Dynasty to the Five Dynasties(206 BC–960 AD)is reconstructed.Finally,the relationship between the variations in temperature and precipitation and the fluctuation of grain yields is examined.The results show that from the Western Han Dynasty to the Five Dynasties,bumper,average and poor harvest decades accounted for 33.3%,39.3%and 27.4%of the 1,166-year period,respectively.The grain yields during 206 BC–960 AD can be divided into three stages:a period of bumper harvests during 206–51 BC,poor harvests during 50 BC–590 AD and bumper harvests during 591–960 AD.Bumper harvest decades typically experienced a warm climate with normal or high levels of precipitation,while poor harvest decades had a cold and dry climate.A positive correlation was found between temperature and grain yield because a warm climate allows a full use of resources.The observed relationship between precipitation and grain yield indicated that
