Narratives of nineteenth century drought in southern Africa in different historical source types

Nash, David J.; Klein, Jørgen; Endfield, Georgina H.; Pribyl, Kathleen; Adamson, George; Grab, Stefan

doi:10.1007/s10584-018-2352-6

Cited by 27 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(49 reference statements)

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“…Brázdil et al (2013) reconstructed drought in the Czech Lands from 1090 to 2012, also using instrumental data and documentary evidence. Nash et al (2019) identified drought events in southeast Africa including newspapers, colonial and missionary materials.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing impacts and societal responses to drought in southwestern Germany since 1800

2019

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Drought directly and indirectly affects the entire socioeconomic and environmental sectors in southwestern Germany. Such impacts are a result of the drought hazard and an underlying vulnerability of the systems. With respect to climate change and the dynamics of vulnerability over time, it becomes crucial to investigate the preceding components, in order to understand possible future magnitudes of the hazard and drivers of drought impacts. Therefore, drought indices were generated from the early nineteenth century in order to identify exceptional meteorological summer droughts. Documentary evidence and historical yield statistics were used to contextualise historical drought events by drought impacts and responses. Considering both, selected summer drought events were analysed and mutually compared based on the impact on society and ecology, as well as societal responses to these. The derived standardised indices highlight differences between severe droughts in duration and temporal peculiarity and put into perspective the current understanding of the intensity of recent drought hazards. The discourse analysis reveals that the propagation of drought and the kinds of impacts have remained rather similar through time, only shifting to modern livelihood assets. However, vulnerability, which strongly depends on the societal contexts, has changed over time and lowered severity of impacts, especially with regard to food and water supply, as well as human health.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing impacts and societal responses to drought in southwestern Germany since 1800

2019

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“…Structurally, they correspond to today's drought definitions and classifications. The descriptions of impacts and consequences and the derived pathways of historical events are in most cases comparable to recent events (Erfurt et al, 2019;Blauhut et al, 2016;Glaser et al, 2016Glaser et al, , 2017Glaser et al, , 2018Brazdil et al, 2016or Nash et al, 2019. Therefore, a parallelization is possible.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A precipitation deficit is followed by a specific pathway. It first appears on the agricultural, then the hydrological and finally the socio-economic level -a development reflected by modern drought definitions (Nash et al, 2019;Erfurt et al, 2019). These time-and intensity-related chains of effects can be derived from the historical sources as characteristic pathways.…”

Section: Derivation Of Historical Pathways and Drought Categories Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Numerous studies on droughts with an explicitly historical perspective have been presented in recent years, for example by Nash and Grab (2010), Gil-Guirado et al (2016), Brazdil et al (2018, and Erfurt et al (2019), implementing a wide range of content and methodological aspects. The spectrum ranges from analyses of outstanding individual years (Wetter et al, 2014) and the derivation of regional time series in different climatic zones (Noone et al, 2017;Kiss, 2017;Dobrovolný et al, 2018;Nash et al, 2019) to a focus on drought effects (Glaser et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reconstructions of droughts in Germany since 1500 – combining hermeneutic information and instrumental records in historical and modern perspectives

Glaser

Kahle

2020

Clim. Past

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Abstract. The present article deals with the reconstruction of drought time series in Germany since 1500. The reconstructions are based on historical records from the virtual research environment Tambora (tambora.org, 2018) and official instrumental records. The historical records and recent data were related to each other through modern index calculations, drought categories and their historical equivalents. Historical and modern written documents are also taken into account to analyze the climatic effects and consequences on the environment and society. These pathways of effects are derived and combined with different drought categories. The derived historical precipitation index (HPI) is correlated with the standardized precipitation index (SPI). Finally, a historical drought index (HDI) and a historical wet index (HWI) are derived from the basic monthly precipitation index (PI) from 1500 onward. Both are combined for the historical humidity index (HHI). On this basis, the long-term development of dryness and drought in Germany since 1500, as well as medium-term deviations of drier and wetter periods and individual extreme events, is presented and discussed.

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“…Glaser et al (2017) have done the same for Central Europe, Brázdil et al (2019) for Northern Europe, and Pfister (2011) for Western Europe. To highlight only a few regions, Nash et al (2019) explore the relationship between society and natural risk in southern Africa, Barriendos and Rodrigo (2006) for the Iberian Peninsula, and Endfield (2007) for colonial Mexico. Some works have explored the possibility of establishing quantitative methodologies through contextual analysis (Gil-Guirado et al, 2016, 2019Glaser and Khale, 2020;Prieto and García Herrera, 2009;Diez-Herrero, 2020) with optimal results being obtained for regions with a common history and culture.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The risk is in the detail: historical cartography and a hermeneutic analysis of historical floods in the city of Murcia

Gil-Guirado

Cantos

Pérez‐Morales

et al. 2021

CIG

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The study of historical floods is a growing research trend that has generated numerous methodologies that aim to convert the qualitative historical documentation into quantitative information. This codification process aims to make comparable in time and space the manner in which past societies adapted to floods, and so extract the positive or negative points that can help reduce vulnerability and increase the resilience of current societies. However, the diversity of cultural and historical contexts, as well as the spatial-temporal heterogeneity of documentary sources, makes it difficult to extrapolate quantitative methods in historical climatology. This situation means that interpretative analyses of texts are still necessary as a complement to quantitative studies. In this paper, we make a hermeneutic analysis of the three most catastrophic floods that have occurred in the city of Murcia (south-eastern Spain) in the last 400 years. We complete this analysis with a historical cartographic reconstruction of a quantitative nature. Among the main conclusions, we highlight the fact that the society of Murcia had strategies to overcome catastrophes that included the whole of society and an integrated emergency management. However, the state of poverty of privation prior to a flood is a determining factor in explaining the resilience of a social system. A large increase in exposure of flood-prone areas over the past two centuries is noteworthy but unsurprising. However, it is surprising that the percentage of urban area exposed to flooding is now smaller than in the past. Therefore, if we consider hazard avoidance as a form of management, we can say that pre-industrial Murcian society was less efficient in using the mechanisms available to adapt to flooding.

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Narratives of nineteenth century drought in southern Africa in different historical source types

Cited by 27 publications

References 38 publications

Changing impacts and societal responses to drought in southwestern Germany since 1800

Changing impacts and societal responses to drought in southwestern Germany since 1800

Reconstructions of droughts in Germany since 1500 – combining hermeneutic information and instrumental records in historical and modern perspectives

The risk is in the detail: historical cartography and a hermeneutic analysis of historical floods in the city of Murcia

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