About the project
How did people react when they faced climatical challenges similar to those we face today?
In this project, we look at the last period of major climate change in the Nordic region, the Little Ice Age 1500-1800 AD, to reconstruct natural impacts and societal responses.
Climate change is not immediately perceptible. To make climate science relevant it needs to be related to human lifeworlds. The past offers a rich repertoire of people confronting climatical challenges similar to the ones we are facing today.
The CLIMCULT draws on lived historical experiences to situate current challenges. It researches how people in Norway adapted to the Little Ice Age. The findings will be related to current concerns through a series of “climate narration labs”. Such an endeavour requires novel forms of cooperation between the sciences, the humanities and non-academic spaces.
In 2024/2025 the project will team up with a research group on the Nordic Little Ice Age hosted by the Center for Advanced Studies, Oslo.
You can read some press articles about our research here, here, here and here.
Interdisciplinarity
Current research is often limited by disciplinary fragmentation. In contrast, this project connects climatologists, historians and museum practitioners in an agenda of “big interdisciplinarity” spanning the sciences and the humanities.
The projects novel and integrated research plan covers the entire process of:
- sampling historical records and tree-ring data,
- integrating these archives of nature and the archives of society in a dynamic, non-determinist process, and
- disseminating its findings in cooperation with the new Klimahuset in Olso.
Objectives
The objectives of the project are threefold. It will:
- reconstruct how Nordic societies adapted during the last period of accelerated climatic change.
- establish a “socionatural” model for the emerging field of climate history.
- transgress academic settings and engage a wider public through a collaboration with Klimahuset in Oslo (The Climate House) and the NTNU University Museum (ntnu.edu).
CLIMCULT Exhibition
The Little Ice Age: How did we handle the last climate crisis?
12.3.2025. CLIMCULT's new exhibition at Klimahuset, Oslo explores the relationship between climate change and societal change during the Little Ice Age (1300-1800) and asks: Can we learn something from a 300-year-old climate crisis?
- Extreme weather, unpredictable climate and changing seasons. Sounds familiar? There are many similarities between the rapid climate changes we experienced during the Little Ice Age (1500-1800) and today's climate challenges. In the exhibition, you will get to know people who found solutions to societal problems accelerated by climate change.
- The exhibition opens on March 18th and will be on show for one year. Norgeshistorie hosts an online version of the exhibition with additional texts (in Norwegian). You can also visit the 3D-interactive model.
- Press articles about the exhibition are here, here, and here. A podcast by NRK on the research behind the exhibition is available here.
Online course: The Nordic Little Ice Age
We have launched a dedicated free-to-use online course. It explores interactions between historical societies and their environments during a period of colder climate ca.1300–1850CE, known as the “Little Ice Age” (LIA).
The course encourages students to investigate how stories of disasters, adaptations, and resilience in the face of past climate variability and extreme weather might help us prepare for global warming in our own times.
The course consists of six lessons course with videos by leading experts, commented data, sources and suggested activities. It is aimed at high-school students and provides their teachers (in science, history and social studies) with material on the subject of “sustainability studies” that Nordic teaching plans now increasingly require.
The course was created in cooperation with the Little Ice Age project at the Center for Advanced Study, Oslo and the NORCLI project.
You can access and use the course for free here: climatehistory.net, Canvas (fully exportable) and Norgeshistorie.no (forthcoming). All videos are also available on the courses dedicated youtube channel.
Book: Nordic Climate Histories
The project published a comprehensive book gathering research from across the Nordics in a single open access volume. Available online (and in print) here.
Down the centuries, the people of the Nordic countries have confronted challenges from climatic variability and change and sought ways to survive and adapt. In a time of accelerating global warming, these climate histories take on new contemporary significance. Drawing on tools from the natural and historical sciences, the innovative scholarship in this volume addresses questions such as: How did Nordic societies cope with past climatic hazards? What was the historical significance of the ‘Little Ice Age’ or the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ for Nordic countries? And how do we study, narrate and learn from these past experiences?
