Can history help us navigate climate change? Practical lessons from the past

This paper will reflect on the report “Societal Responses to Significant Change: An Historical Analysis” an early deliverable in the Australian Government funded South East Queensland Climate Adaptation Research Initiative (SEQCARI). Societal Responses to Significant Change looked at over 30 case studies developed by 14 researchers that illustrate the range of contextual responses to change in order to better understand the historical precedents for human adaptive capacity. The paper argues that cultural learning, and therefore adaptive capacity, does not occur in a vacuum. The historical profiling of responses to significant change illustrates how a range of factors contribute to a society’s success or failure. These profiles take the form of scenarios that ground reflection on the future in how human societies and institutions have responded to challenges in the past. The scenarios explore some factors that traverse a range of contexts that can be civilizational, involving a mix of world views and cultural processes designed to facilitate these; Institutional processes that coordinate human activity in context and across time; Individual processes that indicate the at times important role played by individuals working in context. The historical scenarios offered in this paper are intended to clarify the interplay of these factors of scale and to elicit practical responses from stakeholder groups as part of the ongoing work of the SEQCARI project. Jim Dator’s scenario archetypes of continued growth, collapse, steady state and transformation are used to order scenarios and to map the responses of stakeholder participants in the project encounter groups. Ultimately it is argued that historical consciousness deepens human adaptive capacity and facilitates practical engagement with climate change