In 2018, a group of researchers from Princeton and several other universities wrote an information release entitled: Historians to climate researchers: Let's talk: Learning how past societies handled environmental stresses can help modern policymakers confront global climate change. (1)

It references their 2018 PNAS paper (2), which argued for stronger collaboration between historians and climate scientists in order to better understand past societal resilience or vulnerability to environmental stresses.

Humans and hence their societies are in interplay with the environment over decades to centuries, examples including ENSO in Australia, hurricane tracks in the Caribbean and eastern US, fluctuations of the Indian monsoon. In working to explain how societies can respond in different ways to stresses and strains (hence what underlies levels of resilience or otherwise, and the practical use of that understanding today), researchers need to explore:

1. the influence of major climate fluctuations compared with other major stressors, and the ability to tease out interactions, when they overlap temporally;
2. what constituted societal resilience, eg did the society survive a catastrophe and recover, even though millions of people may have lost their lives (do lives count or just societies?);
3. the degree of relevance of past instances to a modern challenge, and hence what lessons can assist improvements in modern resilience.

This paper will extend the call made by those historians in 2018, to continue and even enhance the collaboration between disciplines, to enhance our ability to both manage and respond to change.

(1) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319144601.htm, posted March 19, 2018.

(2) John Haldon, Lee Mordechai, Timothy P. Newfield, Arlen F. Chase, Adam Izdebski, Piotr Guzowski, Inga Labuhn, Neil Roberts. History meets palaeoscience: Consilience and collaboration in studying past societal responses to environmental change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018; 201716912 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1716912115.