Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 114, Issue 49, Pages 12970-12975Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706470114
Keywords
epidemics; climate; scale dependent; natural disaster; disease
Categories
Funding
- External Cooperation Program of Bureau of International Cooperation (BIC), Chinese Academy of Sciences [152111KYSB20150023]
- Key International Cooperation of National Natural Science Foundation of China [31420103913]
- scientific program of the Biological Consequences of Global Change
- scientific program of the International Society of Zoological Sciences
- scientific program of the International Union of Biological Sciences
- Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic within the National Sustainability Program I (NPU I Grant) [LO1415]
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A wide range of climate change-induced effects have been implicated in the prevalence of infectious diseases. Disentangling causes and consequences, however, remains particularly challenging at historical time scales, for which the quality and quantity of most of the available natural proxy archives and written documentary sources often decline. Here, we reconstruct the spatiotemporal occurrence patterns of human epidemics for large parts of China and most of the last two millennia. Cold and dry climate conditions indirectly increased the prevalence of epidemics through the influences of locusts and famines. Our results further reveal that low-frequency, long-term temperature trends mainly contributed to negative associations with epidemics, while positive associations of epidemics with droughts, floods, locusts, and famines mainly coincided with both higher and lower frequency temperature variations. Nevertheless, unstable relationships between human epidemics and temperature changes were observed on relatively smaller time scales. Our study suggests that an intertwined, direct, and indirect array of biological, ecological, and societal responses to different aspects of past climatic changes strongly depended on the frequency domain and study period chosen.
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