Economic History, Climate, and the Environment is a Joint Center for History and Economics initiative to encourage new histories of economic life and the environment. Our starting point is the need to "understand and reduce the loss and damage" caused by climate change (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 3/CP.18.) The initiative will be based at the Cambridge CHE, at CHE-P, and at the Harvard CHE. The Joint Center is deeply grateful to Carol Richards, the late David K Richards and the Richards family for their continuing support.
The Harvard Center is pleased to introduce 1800 Histories. The project is an effort to understand the local circumstances of more than a thousand sites - the ultra-emitters of methane gas - that are of outsized importance in the causes of climate change.
An undergraduate course at Harvard taught by Emma Rothschild and Victor Seow explored historical approaches to climate change. This website showcases student work from the course.
Nature’s End: History and the Environment, by Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin, was recently cited by Pope Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation 'To all people of goodwill on the climate crisis'.
Victor Seow was awarded the 2023 John Whitney Hall Book Prize for his book Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia.
The group, based at the Cambridge Centre and hosted by Paul Warde, meets weekly at the Centre. On 28 November the group will be discussing Peder Roberts' work in progress.
Marking the tercentenary, we are pleased to share a series of essays over the next weeks by Emma Rothschild about Adam Smith and climate change - "Adam Smith, Climate and Loss."
Ifeosa Anwulika Nkem-Onyekpe has contributed a new essay on our Visualizing Climate and Loss website regarding the devastating floods in Southern Nigeria and their socioeconomic consequences.
In an essay on our Visualizing Climate and Loss website, Isobel Akerman explores the historic process of cliff erosion in Christchurch Bay, and reflects on the causes of, and responses to, this visible loss.
Paul Warde discusses two very different books that responded to The Limits to Growth report of 1972, but that while radically differing politically, tell us much about what was shared across debates about the environment in the 1970s.
Paul Warde contributed a new essay caption to the Invisible Histories website where he discusses the connections between tools, work and our understanding of skill in economic history.
The question is somewhere, somehow in everyone’s consciousness: how is it possible to live with loss, and with unknown, unimaginable changes in climate? Visualizing Climate and Loss is a platform for thinking with history about change, loss, and daily life -- and for thinking about what is to be done.
Through an intimate history of Tiree, Paul Warde tells a story of how apparently distant industrialization transformed the lives of islanders, and their relationships with local resources and the sea, eventually scattering the community around the globe.
The consequences of climate change are local as well as global, and so are the causes. The 1,800 Histories project is an effort to understand the local circumstances of more than a thousand sites - the ultra-emitters of methane gas - that are of outsized importance in the continuing genesis of human-induced climate change.
Harriet Ritvo, Emeritus Professor of History at MIT, and Mark Hersey, Editor of Environmental History, will be visiting the Cambridge Centre to work with students and participate in a series of events this spring.
Based at Sciences Po, this research seminar on the history of science, technology and the environment is concerned with environmental politics and economics, in Europe and the world, since the eighteenth century.
This project explores how the historical study of energy use and transformation can widen perspectives on economic, social, and environmental processes in the past. It also serves as an ongoing repository for data on historical energy use, and a forum for the historical discussion of energy in all its forms in a global and comparative context.
