Understanding past climate and natural hazards has long been central to geoscience and climatology. In today’s era of accelerating climate change and geopolitical instability, it is vital to move beyond physical processes to societal responses, especially pathways of just transition. This concept refers to shifts toward sustainable and resilient systems that also ensure social equity, economic stability, and environmental health. Though the term is modern, history offers many examples—responses to extreme weather, resource scarcity, agricultural crises, or environmentally driven industrial restructuring—that reveal the conditions, trade-offs, and obstacles behind both successful and failed transitions. This session examines how to reconstruct and analyze such historical cases, from the recent past to the last millennium, using interdisciplinary sources:
Paleoclimate archives tracing variability, extremes, and long-term changes.
Historical records such as legal, administrative, and economic documents, correspondence, maps, migration and agricultural data, colonial archives, and oral histories showing social, economic, and political dimensions.
Archaeological and architectural evidence including settlement patterns, building structures, and material remains of adaptation and resilience.
We invite contributions combining climatic and geoscientific data with socio-economic and political perspectives to explore how environmental pressures intersected with governance, livelihoods, and social justice. Topics may include:
• Community adaptation to climate stresses and hazards across the last millennium;
• Equity and justice in adaptation measures—succeeded or failed;
• Evolution of governance, technology, and resource management during transitions;
• New approaches for systematic analysis of past just transitions.
The aim is to build evidence-based pathways for managing future climate risks in socially equitable and geopolitically informed ways.
We welcome submissions from historians, archaeologists, climatologists, geoscientists, anthropologists, economists, social and political scientists, as well as policy experts, heritage practitioners, and community researchers. Proposals that bridge climate and hazard reconstructions with socio-political outcomes, or that introduce new methods for extracting and integrating data on just transitions, are especially encouraged.