Garama’s Director, Nick Brooks, has a new paper out in the Danish Journal of Geography, in a special issue titled ‘Exploring causal relations: the societal effects of climate change’. The paper addresses the dichotomy between the ‘maximalist’ approach, that sees climate change as ‘causing’ phenomena such as migration and conflict, and the ‘minimalist’ approach, which maintains that the effects of climate change on such phenomena cannot be separated out from the effects of other drivers (e.g. economic and policy changes that affect livelihoods). Minimalist approaches are emerging as the dominant framework for approaching climate change impacts on society, for example with the publication of the Foresight Report on climate change and migration in 2011.
In the paper, Nick argues that, while maximalist approaches are problematic and generally overly simplistic, minimalist approaches fail to acknowledge the limits of the empirical evidence in which they are grounded. This evidence extends back only into very recent historical times and thus represents contexts associated with relatively stable climatic conditions, historical extremes notwithstanding. While useful, this recent historical evidence arguably is of limited utility as a guide to the very large changes in climatic and environmental conditions likely to be experienced over the coming decades as the global climate reorganises itself as a result of anthropogenic warming.
The last episode of global climatic reorganisation occurred between about 6000 and 5000 years ago, and Nick’s paper discusses some insights from this period that can help us to think ‘outside the box’ of recent historical experience. Nick argues that we should reject the dogmatic extremes of maximalism and minimalism, and recognise that the relative importance of different drivers of societal change varies over time. Evidence from the distant past illustrates that climate change can be the dominant driver of changes in human societies under certain circumstances, even if this situation is temporary. It is likely that climate change will become the dominant driver of such changes once more, at least in some parts of the world and at certain times, as the 21st century unfolds. We need to think about where and when this might be the case, and what it might mean in terms of adaptation. We’re entering new territory, and using maps based only on our limited historical experience might get us lost.
Nick has written a blog post on the subject addressed by the paper on his personal website. For an electronic version of the paper, contact Nick.
