【量化历史网上讲座系列】(Quantitative History Webinar Series)由香港大学陈志武教授和马驰骋博士联合发起并举办，旨在介绍前沿量化历史研究成果、促进同仁交流，推广量化方法在历史研究中的应用。本系列讲座由国际量化历史学会、香港大学经济管理学院和亚洲环球研究所全力支持和承办。
讲座信息
From forest to farmland and meadow to metropolis: How did the environment shape human history, and how did humanity bring about the Anthropocene?
主讲人: Jed O. Kaplan, Environmental historian and Associate Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong
时间：2021年6月10日 16:00 - 17:30 （北京时间，星期四）
讲座语言：英文
讲座介绍
Did humans affect global climate before the Industrial Era? While this question is hotly debated, the co-evolution of humans and the natural environment since the last Ice Age had an undisputed role in influencing the development and present state of landscapes, many of which are highly valued today as economic, cultural, and ecological resources. Yet we still have a very incomplete picture of human-environment interactions over the last 21,000 years, both spatially and temporally, and how those interactions shaped the world in which we live today.
In order to address this problem, over the past decade Jed O. Kaplan of HKU Department of Earth Sciences has worked on synthesizing demographic, technological, and economic development over preindustrial time, and creating a database of historical urbanization covering the last 8,000 years. These data are combined with computer simulation models to quantify the magnitude and timing of global anthropogenic land cover change in the late Pleistocene and preindustrial Holocene. His models are informed by paleoclimate scenarios from global climate models and simulate global land cover and human land use change, fire, soil erosion, and emissions of the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane (CH4).
His results highlight the importance of the long histories of both climate change and human demographic, economic, and technological history on the development of continental-scale landscapes. A large source of uncertainty in the results comes from assumptions researchers make about the rates and timing of technologically driven intensification of land use, and the importance of international trade for the subsistence of past societies and human influence on the planet. Jed O. Kaplan emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary geographical research that unites the social and physical sciences, and the humanities, to build on recent theory of preindustrial economic and technological change.
In this Quantitative History Webinar, Jed O. Kaplan will take the audience on a journey through time, starting with the way our distant hominin ancestors modified their environments to increase their chances of survival, and coming to the question of whether the planet itself can now survive the multitude of demands placed on it by modern society.
“量化历史研究”公众号由陈志武（香港大学冯氏基金讲席教授、原耶鲁大学教授）和龙登高（清华大学教授）及其团队——林展（中国人民大学）、熊金武（中国政法大学）、何石军（武汉大学）、蒋勤（上海交通大学）、彭雪梅（中山大学）等人负责。向学界和业界朋友，定期推送量化历史研究经典、前沿文献。同时作为“量化历史讲习班”信息交流平台。喜欢我们的朋友请搜寻公众号：QuantitativeHistory，或扫描下面二维码关注。
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