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.
The climate impact of the Little Ice Age is considered an important reason for the "17th century crisis" of various regions across the Eurasian continent. Using the recently reconstructed agricultural harvest sequence as an intermediary, this study re-examines the dynamic impact process and transmission mechanism of climate shocks in the downfall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644CE), the most important geopolitical event in East Asia at that time. Under the macro climate background of the combination of the driest and coldest periods in the past 2000 years, the Ming Dynasty was continuously struck by severe climate disasters and crop failures. In response to these challenges, the Ming court has been working to enhance its resilience to climatic shocks through local finance transfers and silver finance. However, this strategy has inadvertently weakened local communities' ability to cope with such shocks. However, since the mid-16th century, changes in weather patterns have led to large-scale synchronous crop failures in both northern and southern China, making it difficult for the Ming Dynasty to implement cross regional macroeconomic regulation and control measures. This dilemma reached its peak in the early 17th century, leading to sustained disaster relief failures and peasant rebellions. At the same time, the hostile Manchurian regime in the northeast suffered and survived climate shocks and agricultural disasters earlier and more lightly, rejoining the anti-Ming alliance of climate disasters and peasant armies. After the 1640s, climate anomalies and disasters gradually subsided from north to south, accompanied by the Manchu regime's gradual southward conquest and eventual occupation of the remaining forces of the Ming Dynasty. This study provides a dynamic spatiotemporal process of the impact of climate change on the downfall of the Ming Dynasty, and can also serve as a comparative case for studying the response to climate change of other regimes on the Eurasian continent at that time.
How to cite: Kang, Y.: The Little Ice Age, Agricultural Disasters, and Social Resilience Dynamic: A Case Review of Ming Dynasty China in East Eurasia, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-813, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-813, 2026.
The 1860s and 1870s brought years of extreme drought to Central Europe. In the field of hydrology, these extremes led to the establishment of the Hydrographic Commission of the Czech Kingdom in 1875. The end of the 1870s brought a major change. The years 1880 to 1882, which brought a series of floods, were a truly extraordinary change. In our contribution, we focused on the floods in the summer of 1880, when the western part of the Austrian monarchy was hit by repeated floods in June and August. We are preparing the floods and their processing for our Map of Extreme Floods (MEF) application, which is now included among the professional goals of the Floods Working Group PAGES. Methodologically, this involves the collection and interpretation of documentary sources. The aim is to fix the data obtained, check it, and, in particular, present the flood event in its entirety. The August floods occurred in two phases, approximately from August 4 to 6 and then again from August 12 to 16. A characteristic feature of this flood is the fact that the extreme flows did not reach large rivers such as the Elbe or Danube, but mainly their tributaries and often smaller mountain streams. Among affected localities was the imperial residence of Bad Ischl. This flood was an unplanned surprise for emperor's Franz Josef "50th birthday," August celebration. Given the concentration of important guests from across the monarchy and abroad, we can assume that the flood gained significance even in the highest imperial circles. The situation was also extreme in other parts of the monarchy. Some locations in Moravia experienced two to three floods within three months. This is because devastating floods had already hit the northern windward side of the Czech border mountains and parts of the Moravian mountains in June. In August, the industrial city of Ostrava was catastrophically affected by flooding, which remains the largest known flood to date. The level reached on August 5, 1880, was not exceeded even by the catastrophic floods of July 1997. This led, for example, to the immediate development of a project to regulate the Ostravice River. The experience with these floods and, ultimately, the catastrophic floods in Tyrol in September 1882 led to the adoption of Imperial Laws 116 and 117 on torrent control and land improvement. In August 1880, the railway connection between Vienna and Krakow, Vienna and Bad Ischl, and Munich was interrupted in many places. Therefore, this flood was also a lesson for domestic railway engineers. It is likely that these floods led the head of the Prague Hydrological Service, Prof. A. R. Harlacher to develop a modern hydrological forecasting method based on flow balancing, which he and his colleague J. Richter developed between 1882 and 1884 and successfully tested in 1886. Our contribution is further example of the truworthy of the thesis that major extreme floods usually, but not always and everywhere, brought significant progress in hydrology and changes in water management.
How to cite: Elleder, L., Šírová, J., Stehlíková, H., and Kabelka, T.: Extreme floods in the summer of 1880 in the Austrian monarchy and their impact on water management in Bohemia and Austria, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-12775, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-12775, 2026.
Historical research has increasingly recognized that past societies were shaped by climate variability, yet the mechanisms linking climatic stress, governance, and long-term adaptation remain unevenly explored. In particular, little attention has been paid to how recurrent droughts affected the fiscal foundations of early modern states and how these pressures contributed to the historical construction of climatic regions, such as the Mediterranean, as objects of governance and identity.
This paper examines the relationship between drought, agrarian production, and fiscal vulnerability in early modern Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the emergence of the political-environmental idea of España seca (“dry Spain”). Rather than treating climate as a deterministic driver of crisis, the study explores how climatic variability interacted with a highly tensioned agrarian–fiscal system dependent on stable cereal production and predictable revenue extraction.
Methodologically, the paper combines historical climatology and socio-economic analysis by integrating drought proxies derived from rogation ceremonies with long-term cereal tithe series. Rogation data are transformed into a standardized drought index, while tithe series are normalized to capture relative fluctuations in agrarian output and fiscal capacity across regions. This comparative approach allows for the identification of synchronous and asynchronous patterns between climatic stress and agrarian-fiscal performance.
The results suggest that periods of recurrent drought coincided with sustained declines in agrarian output and increased volatility in tithe revenues, undermining fiscal predictability rather than simply causing episodic shortages. These dynamics contributed to a shift in political interpretation: drought increasingly came to be framed not as a temporary anomaly but as a structural environmental condition. This reframing crystallized in the notion of España seca, which linked aridity, agricultural fragility, and economic vulnerability.
During the eighteenth century, this interpretation informed governance strategies aimed at stabilizing production and revenue through agrarian and hydraulic interventions. In this sense, the Mediterranean climate emerged not only as a descriptive category but as a historically produced framework for managing climatic risk. By tracing these processes, the paper highlights how climate stress can catalyse enduring governance pathways and regional identities, offering historically grounded insights relevant to contemporary debates on climate adaptation and transition strategies in Mediterranean environments.
How to cite: Celis, A. and Villarín, M. C.: Transitions under Climate Stress: Drought, Governance, and the Emergence of the Mediterranean Climate in Early Modern Spain, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-13159, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-13159, 2026.
This study investigates how volcanic eruptions influence climate anomalies and climate-related societal stress in East Asia during 1368–1912(Ming and Qing Dynasty). Volcanic eruptions can loft sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, reduce incoming solar radiation, cool the surface, and disrupt circulation and monsoon moisture transport; in agrarian economies, these shocks may propagate into harvest shortfalls, food-price spikes, famine, and political instability. We define eruption event years (t0) using an ice-core sulfate–based volcanic chronology. We use temperature and precipitation indices from the REACHES (Reconstructing East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series, REACHES) database, which converts qualitative weather descriptions preserved in Chinese historical archives (e.g., local gazetteers, memorials, and official reports) into standardized, quantatative indices. We apply Superposed Epoch Analysis (SEA) to estimate mean anomalies within a t0±K-year window around eruptions, and we stratify results by season and sub-region to resolve when and where impacts are strongest. Results indicate that cooling is detectable but not spatially uniform: the magnitude, persistence, and timing of post-eruption cooling vary across regions and between warm- and cold-season windows, implying seasonally modulated pathways of volcanic forcing. Precipitation responses are more heterogeneous, showing regionally specific shifts and lags consistent with differing monsoon sensitivities. Building on these climate anomalies as a background stressor, we compile and align socio-economic indicators—grain-price fluctuations, famine reports, and records of social unrest—to assess whether post-eruption societal risks are amplified under particular seasonal–regional configurations. We further examine governmental responses to mounting pressures, including relief provisioning, granary operations, and price-management practices. By integrating documentary climate indices with historical socio-economic evidence, this study provides support and a historical interpretive framework for the eruption–regional climate response–societal vulnerability nexus.
How to cite: Chen, C.-Y., Lin, K.-H. E., Tseng, W.-L., Lin, C.-W., Huang, H.-C., and Wang, P. K.: Seasonal and Regional Heterogeneity of Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society in East Asia (1368–1912), EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-16200, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-16200, 2026.
The issue of water resources is an old one, and echoes current concerns, with freshwater resources under increasing anthropogenic pressure. It encompasses aspects related to researching its origin, transport, use, and even its quantification and quality. The use of natural archives to trace the history of this resource in relation to environmental variations or anthropogenic activities is growing rapidly. Here we present a study of secondary carbonate concretions found in the water supply systems of the Palace of Versailles. The supply of water to the castle gardens presented a series of major technical challenges, which evolved considerably throughout its history. Formed layer by layer over time by water leaks, they represent unique archives of the waters of the past that allowed them to form. They therefore offer a unique opportunity to track changes in supply or even the influence of various modifications made over time.
Here we present a study of concretions taken from under the famous Latone fountain, under the Neptune basin, and in a technical gallery. We discuss the chronological aspects for precise dating and the geochemical tracers to be monitored. We focus here on the study of lead, an element that is very present both in the materials used for fountains and water supply systems and as a marker of urban pollution. We use its isotopic signature to discuss its origin in these waters and its evolution over time.
How to cite: Pons-Branchu, E., Malnar, D., Caffy, I., Dapoigny, A., Douville, E., Dumoulin, J. P., and Roy Barman, M.: The waters of the Palace of Versailles: secondary carbonate deposits in the famous fountains bear witness of their history. Case study on the origin of lead., EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-15082, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-15082, 2026.
Monastic communities of western (Benedictine) and eastern (Bazilite) origin emerged in medieval Hungary latest in the 11th century and were joined by other orders in later centuries, representing all major branches of monasticism. Island monasteries connected to major rivers (e.g. the Danube) or lakes (e.g. Balaton) appeared as characteristic monastic landscapes from the first period of monastic culture in Hungary. A significant number of monasteries, representing a great variety of orders, were established on small islands of the Middle Danube, many being connected to royal centres (e.g. Esztergom, Visegrád, Buda). As well as the documentary and archaeological evidence concerning island monasteries, similar evidence of the most important flood-rich periods and some major Danube floods are also available from the early 13th century onwards. Seasonal/annual documentary flood data can be reconstructed from the early 15th century to the end of the 16th century. The relationship between the Danube floods and island monasteries, flood resilience, mitigation, prevention strategies and their improvements are studied in more detail through the examples of five Danube monasteries. Particularly detectable since the late 13th century, major building periods and occasional abandonments often coincided with flood-rich periods or followed great or extraordinary Danube floods, and occurred during dearth years or periods of monastic crisis. Because of improved flood prevention measures, even if occasionally beset with financial difficulties, most of the small Danube island monasteries showed high flood resilience and survived until the end of the Middle Ages. In the poster presentation, we provide an overview of the detectable flood mitigation and prevention practices and their potential implications in modern flood prevention measures.
How to cite: Kiss, A. and Laszlovszky, J.: Medieval Danube island monasteries: flood resilience, mitigation, prevention and adaption in the Middle Danube region, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-12884, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-12884, 2026.
Weather and climate extreme events cause a large number of human and material losses, as well as impacts on different sectors of society and on the environment. Therefore, mitigation and adaptation to them are a priority for national and international agencies, particularly in the current context of climate change, which is expected to increase the occurrence and magnitude of extreme events in many regions worldwide. Currently, a wide range of tools exists to measure the magnitude of extreme events from meteorological, climatic or hydrological perspectives. However, studying their impacts still presents major challenges, as most international databases cover only short time periods, do not encompass the full range of extreme event types or impacts, and tend to focus primarily on high-impact events. This makes them insufficient for detailed studies. However, there are a large number of documentary sources (operational bulletins, technical reports, post-event analyses, newspaper articles, or scientific papers, among others) that provide unstructured information, which is reliable and in some cases authoritative, on the characteristics of the event and its impacts. In many cases, these documentary sources are presented in the local language of the country in which the event occurred. These two barriers (unstructured information and the language) clearly limit access to invaluable information on the impacts of extreme events. The CLASiK project (Cross Lingual Access to Scientific Knowledge) addresses these barriers; its main objective is to facilitate smooth and interoperable access to multilingual documentary sources, data hubs and repositories with information about impacts of extreme events on the Web for stakeholders and researchers who engage with them in their own native languages. To that end, we will build methodologies and tools for extracting, indexing and accessing scientific documents in several languages, making them interoperable and accessible to query in natural languages. The specific objectives of the Project related to this case study are: i) To provide researchers and stakeholders with a reliable framework that helps solving discovery of information on extreme events impacts across different languages. This framework will be demonstrated by developing a unified knowledge graph and Web portal to access different mono/multilingual data sources; ii) To develop a family of language services and tools that make monolingual data silos interoperable through a multilingual knowledge graph, semantically annotate scientific data and documents to extend such knowledge graph, and allow the users to query such multilingual repository and translate the answer back to their own language; iii) To disseminate and communicate the project results according to open science principles, to raise awareness, exchange of ideas with researchers from outside the consortium, and build a community of stakeholders.
How to cite: Domínguez-Castro, F., Augello, L., Bernad, J., Bobed, C., El-Kenawy, A., Gracia, J., Hernández, M., Ionov, M., Jaagus, J., Jakobson, L., Labbé, C., Lecouteux, B., López Otal, M., Poncet, E., Schwab, D., Sérasset, G., Stirb, O. A., Vilas, D., and Vuth, N.: Cross-lingual access to textual evidence and impacts of weather and climate extreme events, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-18763, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-18763, 2026.
Over the last 25 years, wildfires have shifted from episodic hazards to persistent threats, driven by climate change and long-term socio-environmental transitions. Cultural Landscapes in Wildland–Urban Interface (WUI) areas offer valuable case studies for extracting lessons from the past, as they reflect cumulative changes in land use, demography, governance, and resilience practices.
This study aims to reconstruct historical transition pathways in wildfire risk and resilience by identifying which climatic, social, and resilience indicators have changed over recent decades, and how these changes inform future adaptation strategies under increasing climate and geopolitical pressures.
An interdisciplinary GIS-based framework integrates wildfire occurrence (MODIS MCD64A1), vegetation condition and water stress (MODIS MOD13Q1), Fire Weather Index (FWI) scenarios, and WUI typologies with field-based resilience indicators collected through structured checklists. These indicators capture landscape management practices, settlement patterns, and local response capacity, and are evaluated using multicriteria analysis. The approach is applied to the cultural landscape in Seville (Spain).
Results show that present wildfire risk is strongly conditioned by past transitions such as rural depopulation, reduced grazing, and fuel accumulation since the late 20th century. Climatic indicators alone do not fully explain risk evolution. The analysis highlights context-specific resilience pathways, including the long-term role of landscape stewardship and nature-based solutions, and the importance of institutional capacity and human mobilisation.
By linking historical data trends with evolving resilience indicators, the framework demonstrates how recent past transitions can guide future risk governance, early warning systems, and adaptive strategies for the sustainable preservation of Cultural Landscapes.
How to cite: Bertolin, C., Romao, X., and Moreno Falcon, M.: Learning from Recent History: Reconstructing Wildfire Risk and Resilience Transitions in Cultural Landscapes to Inform Future Climate Challenges, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-20875, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-20875, 2026.
Through six case studies of major historical as well as recent droughts, the paper provides an overview of the documented short- and long-term drought impacts, the level of resilience, typical administrative and societal responses in historical Hungary and the Middle Danube region, in East Central Europe, where even today drought is singlemost important climate-related natural hazard. The analysis includes the presentation and complex system analysis of four outstanding, well-documented historical droughts occurred in the early 1360s, early 1500s, the 1710s(-1720s) and in the early 1860s, and the recent outstanding drought of 2022, with discussing the different levels, changes and development of drought mitigation, prevention and adaption methods since the Middle Ages until the present.
How to cite: Kiss, A.: Understanding drought mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in Hungary and the Middle Danube region: case studies from the 13th-21st centuries, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-22257, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-22257, 2026.
Newspapers are a highly valuable documentary source to study extreme climate events, their impacts, and the measures societies have taken for mitigation or adaptation. However, the huge volume of published newspapers and the diversity of topics they cover make the manual extraction of this information extremely time-consuming and costly. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown high capabilities for information retrieval and extraction from digital newspapers. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies have evaluated their performance on historical archives available exclusively in paper form, later digitized through scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In these cases, the resulting text layer often contains multiple types of errors, e.g. character-level mistakes (confused letters/numbers, missing accents), broken or merged words, and loss of document structure (incorrect reading order, irregular line breaks, hyphenation artifacts, or disordered tables); which can strongly affect extraction performance.
In this study, we evaluate the ability of LLMs to extract drought impacts from the historical archive of two Spanish newspapers, Hoy and El Periódico de Extremadura, covering the period 1923–1993 (995,558 pages). A manual annotation was carried out to identify both drought related news and their impacts on water resources, energy, agriculture, and livestock.
We use the CienaLLM framework, which provides configurable prompt pipelines designed for structured extraction of climatic events and their impacts from news articles. This enables the orchestration of prompt engineering strategies such as Chain of Thought reasoning, structured output generation, self-criticism, and optional summarization steps.
We assess six open-source LLMs: qwen2.5:3b, qwen2.5:7b, qwen2.5:72b, qwen3:8b, qwen3:30b, and deepseek-r1:8b. Each model is tested under three configurations: no-summary, summary, and expert-summary. In no-summary, extraction is performed directly from the OCR text. In the remaining configurations, the model is asked to summarize the page before extraction: summary generates a general summary, while expert-summary focuses specifically on drought-related information.
Results show that, in general, larger models achieve better performance, and that adding a prior summarization step does not lead to significant improvements for these models. As expected, we find that text quality is a key factor controlling extraction success. To quantify this aspect, we propose the Unknown Words Ratio as a proxy indicator of text quality, and we compute minimum threshold values required to ensure successful extraction of information.
How to cite: Vilas, D., Vaquero, J. M., Díaz Codiño, L., Latorre, B., and Domínguez-Castro, F.: Benchmarking Open-Source LLMs for Drought Impact Extraction in Historical Newspapers, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-23012, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-23012, 2026.
Drought is one of the leading natural hazards in the Mediterranean and Central Europe. It produces direct impacts across multiple sectors and ecosystems, but it also triggers a complex network of cascading effects. As with most climate-related extreme events, drought impacts strongly depend on the socio-economic development and vulnerability of the affected societies. This implies that some sectors were historically much more exposed to drought stress than they are today, while impacts in others have emerged or intensified in modern times. Overall, due to the lower efficiency of agriculture and the limited industrial and infrastructural capacity, droughts were among the most threatening hazards in large parts of Europe in the past.
At the same time, societies have developed a wide range of adaptation strategies to reduce or mitigate these impacts. Over the last millennium, drought has been addressed through multiple approaches, including increasing water storage, developing irrigation and distribution infrastructure, improving groundwater use, adapting crops and agricultural practices, and establishing community rules for water governance.
Across the Mediterranean and Central Europe, many historical strategies show strong similarities, suggesting technological exchange and knowledge transfer between regions through governmental, administrative, and community-based practices.
Here we provide an integrated overview of major short- and long-term historical adaptation strategies, and we illustrate practical responses through selected case studies from Hungary, Italy, and Spain. Finally, we identify key turning points in drought adaptation and discuss major successes and failures in the millennial development of drought prevention and management practices.
How to cite: Dominguez Castro, F., Kiss, A., Enzi, S., and Bertolin, C.: Community adaptation to drought stress: historical examples from the Mediterranean and Central Europe, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-23259, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-23259, 2026.
