About the IHOPE Project Collection...

Understanding the reasons for the emergence, sustainability, decline, or collapse of human societies is a key prerequisite for creating a sustainable and desirable future. A central hypothesis is that the probability of societal collapse, or failure increases with loss of resilience in social-ecological systems. IHOPE assembles integrated environmental and human historical data at the global scale for comparative analysis and for a few key case study areas for dynamic analysis in order to help build this understanding. It develops criteria for integrating and analyzing disparate data across scales and disciplines and better ways to integrate and visualize data from the broad range of relevant sources (i.e. from historical narratives to ice cores) and with a broad range of spatial and temporal resolution and quality.

About IHOPE

• IHOPE Background, Goals, and Grand Questions
• Participants
• Key publication

Background

• Climate, hydrology, land use and environmental degradation in the lower Rhone Valley during the Roman Period by Sander van der Leeuw