Domino effect of climate change over two millennia in ancient China’s Hexi Corridor

Domino effect of climate change over two millennia in ancient China’s Hexi Corridor

Qi Feng^{1 *}, Linshan Yang^{1 *}, Ravinesh C. Deo² , Amir AghaKouchak³ , Jan F. Adamowski⁴, Roger Stone⁵ , Zhenliang Yin¹ , Wei Liu¹ , Jianhua Si¹ , Xiaohu Wen¹ , Meng Zhu¹ and Shixiong Cao⁶

      Climate change, population growth and extreme events can trigger social crises and instability. The processes that dominate a society’s emergence, resilience and collapse, and the complex interactions among such processes, operating within a small region, at a multicentury or even larger time scale, remain to be identified. The causes or driving forces responsible for societal changes must be identified for a plausible explanation. Historical records provide unique examples of societies that have failed to develop buffers and strategic resilience against climate change and natural variability. Using a wide range of observations from China’s Hexi Corridor, the complex interactive processes linking climate change with human society over the past two millennia were investigated. This paper proposes a domino effect resulting from a society’s failure to respond to climate change in which individual small problems create a greater challenge over long time spans. Building resilience against the impacts of climate change requires a deep understanding of social and environmental feedbacks to create a reliable buffer against future changes. This study offers lessons learned from the past 2,000 years that remain relevant today, given the projected changes in climate and extreme events.全文.pdf