Volcanic eruptions, successive poor harvests and social resilience over southwest China during the 18–19th century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15549502 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zhixin Hao (0000-0002-7762-8985, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Danyang Xiong (0000-0002-1922-8924, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Jingyun Zheng (0000-0001-9705-6884, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Liang Emlyn Yang (0000-0003-4414-4009, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Quansheng Ge (0000-0001-8712-8565, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 10 |
| Pages | 105011-105011 |
| Publication date | 2020-08-21 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Research Letters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1748-9326 • E-ISSN: 1748-9326 |
| Publisher | IOP Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1088/1748-9326/abb159 |
| OpenAlex | W3081075544 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 27 |
Volcanic eruptions, climate changes and their influences on crop harvests and social development are of increasing concern in science communities. Using a dataset of crop harvest scores of southwest China from 1730 to 1910, which was derived from the memorials to the emperors in the Qing Dynasty of China, reconstructed climate proxies and the chronology of large volcanic eruptions occurring between 10°S and 15°N, we analysed possible relationships between crop harvests, climate changes and volcanic eruptions. In addition, some archives of policies and measures related to crops and social development extracted from the chronicles were used to analyse social resilience when faced with poor harvests. The results show that crop harvests in the study area generally increased with fluctuations when there were less low-latitude large volcanic eruptions from 1730 to 1810. However, from 1811 to 1910, volcanoes at low latitudes erupted more frequently, which contributed to concurrent low temperature and drought. Meanwhile, the crop harvests showed a step-down decrease during the following periods of 1810s, 1850s, 1870s and 1890s. Though, the local social system was certainly resilient in facing of such climate and agriculture disasters, i.e. the local society remained stable without significant famine, large-scale migration or social unrest until 1911. The strong resilience of local social systems owed largely to various relieving measures, such as, building barns, exempting or reducing local taxes, allocating farmland to immigrants, and central government dominated grain purchasing and distribution to alleviate disasters
Agriculture · Archaeology · China · Climate change · Famine · Geography · Psychological resilience · Volcano · Climate variability and models · Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics · Tree-ring climate responses · Geology
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| Citations per year | 1.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |