Social resilience to changes in climate over the past 5000 years

Abstract Increasing numbers of studies are investigating the phenomenon of social resistance, particularly instances of stability or prosperity in the face of climatic–environmental stresses over a long period. This emerging research field of climate resilience explores the capability of socio-ecological systems to cope with stresses, maintain functions, and evolve into more desirable systems within stressful climatic and environmental conditions. This synthetic review examines historical and archaeological studies on climate resilience especially concentrating on human societies in the past 5000 years. It highlights that human societies have had a degree of general resilience to climate and environmental stresses over various spatial and temporal scales, which is reflected through the evidence of population growth, agriculture development, settlement expansion and continuing social-economic development in hazard-prone conditions. Many of the cases considered here demonstrate that climate resilience manifests as a profile of resilience loop and scale relationships in different social systems. Multiple and diverse measures have been identified as being helpful in enhancing the resilience level of various social systems, e.g. improvement of infrastructure, knowledge and technology development, and the strengthening of social organization and cooperation. This review emphasizes the necessity and priority of deepening our understanding of long-term resilience dynamics, and it calls for holistic studies in the field of climate resiliology, particularly targeting to effective and efficient resilience measures as well as their transference across time and space.