Abstract
Does the current climate change enhance the risk of future pandemics?
A way to search for an answer on this difficult question is using the past as a key to the present.
Past episodes of climate change can provide a resource for understanding the complex links between the social responses to environmental stress and environment-disease connections, especially when locally constrained high temporal resolution paleoclimate reconstructions are available.
Here we present an example from Roman Times, stretching from the so-called Roman Climate Optimum to the Late Antique Little Ice Age, a timespan that overlaps some of the first widely attested pandemic disease outbreaks in human history, i.e. the Antonine Plague (~165-180 CE), the Plague of Cyprian (~251-266 CE) and the First Plague Pandemic (~541-766 CE (Plague of Justinian). We present how we could reconstruct temperature and precipitation from the heartland of the Roman Empire with a ~3 years resolution between ∼200 BCE ∼600 CE, using fossilized marine microalgae and volcanic ash particles in a southern Italian marine sedimentary archive. We document that phases of instability and cooling associate with pandemic disease and discuss how climate stress might have interacted with social and biological variables.
