Hungry for social policy

At the beginning of this blog I explained the concept of a ‘green transition’ referred to two distinct changes: reducing the environmental intensity of economic activity and improving the resilience of socio-economic systems to changes in climate. My previous posts have all addressed the former topic and so today I’m going to focus on the latter and examine how experiences of past climate change can inform present efforts to increase such societal resilience.

Records of the Great Famine that spread across Northern Europe during 1315-17 exemplify the severe social effects that changes in climate can cause. While historians have been aware of the catastrophic event for centuries, thanks to the harrowing accounts recorded by medieval chroniclers, more recent analyses have reconstructed climatic conditions during the period in order to examine the causes of the crisis. The tree-ring and GISP2 ice core analyses (undertaken by Lyons in Crawford (ed) 1989 (Ch. 2) and Dawson et al 2007 respectively), conclude that Northern Europe experienced significant increases in rainfall during 1315-16 that occurred alongside an increase in Northern Atlantic sea surface temperature. This supports numerous accounts recorded during the famine period that describe prolonged downpours from 1314-1316 that decimated crops and caused severe flooding (Jordan 1996). Although the rains subsided in 1317, the agricultural crisis persisted as widespread outbreaks of livestock murrain, caused by inundated pastures, continued to disrupt agricultural markets. Jordan argues that this caused the crisis period to continue for a further 5 years with food prices returning to pre-1315 levels only after 1322.

While the climatic cause of the famine is uncontested there is evidence that the severity of the crisis was increased by socio-economic factors. Crop failures caused substantial increases in agricultural market prices causing food to become unaffordable for large sectors of the population. Within this group it was the landless poor who experienced the most prolonged and severe impacts as, unable to undertake subsistence agriculture, they were dependent on agricultural markets and therefore endured food scarcity over the entire 1315-1322 period.

By analysing historical records, Kershaw (1973) has identified two factors that caused increases in this particularly vulnerable group during the famine period:

1. Increases in the unemployed landless – Outbreaks of livestock murrain and increased pressures on manorial finances caused large landowners to considerably reduce the number of people they employed resulting an increase in unemployment among landless individuals and, hence, an increase in the landless poor.

2. Reduction in peasant population – Peasants (individuals who undertook subsistence agriculture on small plots of land they owned) were vulnerable to climate variations as they didn’t maintain stores of produce. Following the initial crop failures, these individuals were forced to sell their smallholdings to wealthier households securing a temporary increase in income but removing their capacity to cultivate subsistence crops when the torrential rains ended in 1317. 

The factors highlighted by Kershaw indicate that economic responses can exacerbate the social effects of climate change implying that resilience to future climate change could be increased by policies that inhibit the repeat of these responses:

1. Improving climate-resilience of smallholders – It is clear that measures designed to increase the resilience of agricultural production to climate change are critical to the improvement of broader social resilience.  In particular, policies that seek to ensure that smallholder subsistence agriculturalists are prepared to withstand future climate change and climate variability could minimise a recurrence of the most severe social impacts observed during 1315-22. Reports such as CGIAR (2012) have identified which crops are most suited to increasing food security in poorer countries while also enhancing resilience to future climate and therefore policies that attempt to increase uptake of these crops among smallholders, such as seed subsidies, could be valuable methods of increasing social resilience.

2. Rural employment guarantees – The Great Famine also shows that resilience to climate variations could be improved by reducing the sensitivity of employment to climate change. In the present context, rural workforces dependent on agriculture are most vulnerable to climate variations and therefore, policies to guarantee rural employment could mitigate the social impact of harvest failure. Economist Jean Dreze is a prominent advocate of such policies and in this interview he explains his position and defends India’s rural employment guarantee scheme.

Although it’s necessary to treat precedents from the past with some caution, as their relevance is inevitably constrained by their historical context, an understanding of the factors that have increased vulnerability to climate in the past can be insightful. The experience of the Great Famine exemplifies how economic responses can exacerbate the social impacts of climate events and emphasises that economic policies will be essential in mitigating the severe social consequences threatened by a changing and increasingly variable climate.