CRIAS - Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Societies

Phase 1, 2018-2022: 

- Coordinate and disseminate best practices for climate reconstruction from the archives of societies from all world regions.
- Coordinate and disseminate best practices for creating data for climate-historical databases that collect, tag and qualify information from the archives of society.
- Coordinate and disseminate best practices for integrating information from historical climatology into paleoclimate reconstructions and climate modeling.
- Establish best practices for attributing impacts on past societies to historical climate variability or change.

Phase 2, 2022-2025:

The second phase of CRIAS has three major goals. As originally envisioned, this second phase will turn to methods and standards for attributing historical societal impacts and adaptations to past climatic variability and change. In particular, we would aim:

(1) to better integrate quantitative and qualitative methods in historical climate impact and adaptation research and to overcome cultural and epistemic barriers among scholars of different disciplines working in this field (as discussed in the PAGES Magazine);
(2) to establish a common language and standards for the field so as to avoid overly vague or deterministic claims; and
(3) produce at least one case study using improved methods and standards.

In addition, we would continue the development and application of a novel Bayesian approach to historical climatology, originally proposed at the second CRIAS workshop and in this article. This method promises to improve and extend seasonal temperature and precipitation reconstructions of past centuries and to fully integrate information from paleoclimate and historical records with paleoclimate modeling. It also represents a significant epistemological innovation in the historical sciences, which could be explored in applications beyond historical climatology.

Finally, given that pandemic circumstances limited in-person events, we would like to use this second phase of CRIAS to re-establish networks of collaboration, introduce new scholars into the field, and renew public outreach.