TY - JOUR TI - Climate change and its ecological and socioeconomic impact DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3KP8278 PY - 2010 AB - Climate change is currently of great concern by scientist and public. However, the ecological and socio-economic effects of long-term climate change remains largely unknown. To study on the long-term climate change, and its impacts on the environmental conditions, ecological and socio-economic consequences, the long time series of climate related events from historical records are needed to fill the gap of the instrumental data. In this study, a unique data source -- "The compendium of Chinese Meteorological records of the Last 3,000 years (Zhang 2004) which contains invaluable information about climate related events recorded in the China's historical documents were digitized for the last Dynasty. Pearson correlation test was conducted to test the relationship between crop harvest and climate events in case study one. The results revealed that climate conditions affected past agriculture harvest in China. Besides direct effect of cooling on the land carrying capacity, periodic ecological stresses such as drought events can significantly reduce the agricultural yield. The issue of stationarity of variables is the great concern in this study. Local variations both in temporal and spatial scale analysis were considered in the following case studies. Second case study applied continuous wavelet analysis for analyzing the local variation in temporal scale. The result revealed that the periodicity of fluctuations of locusts, temperature and drought series are consistently at around 100 year's band. The consistent associations between locust and temperature, temperature and drought, locust and drought at same frequency and time space indicted the possible casual interlinks of temperature-drought-locust plague. The finding suggests that drought events driven by long term variation of temperature change explains locust dynamics better than floods. The last case study used Geographically Weighted Regression methods for analyzing spatially varying relationships between determinate variable--famine and explanatory variables such as floods, droughts, poor harvest and locust outbreaks. The results implicated that all variables have significant effects on famine occurrence in last Dynasty of China. Among the explanatory variables, drought shows strongest effect on famine. The results also suggested that there are significant spatial variations across the study area. Therefore, it's important to consider the local regression methods for analyzing the relationships between famine and other climate conditions. KW - Ecology and Evolution KW - Climatic changes--China--History--Qing dynasty, 1644-1912 LA - eng ER -