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Based on the government's historical records and personal documents of the pre-modern Chosŏn Dynasty, this paper examines the socio-economic impacts in Korea in response to climatic variability from 1809 until 1819 that may have been influenced to some degree by the eruption of the "unknown volcano" (1809) and the Tambora eruption (1815). In the early 1800s, when volcanic eruptions occurred successively, the Korean Peninsula experienced a temporal precipitation variation—drought, abundant rainfall, and normalcy—twice. The precipitation variation in this period had a heavy impact on the yields of rice, major crop on the peninsula. In the phase of drought in 1809 and extreme climatic anomalies in 1814, the country suffered record poor harvests, and in the abundant rainfall phase in 1810 and 1816–1817, it had bumper crops. For this reason, 1816–1817 were the halcyon years for Korea, unlike the case of Europe and the northeastern USA which suffered from extreme climatic anomalies in those years. This case of the Korean Peninsula indicates that the climate change and natural disasters of the 1810s were influenced by not only of the single event of the Tambora eruption but of the successive eruptions of volcanoes in the 7 years from 1809 to 1815, which also affected other areas on the globe for 11 years (1809–1819). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on existing theory and proposes a framework to identify vulnerability to climate change in food systems by examining historic cases where common environmental problems caused famine. Cases presented are (1) Ireland's Potato Famine, (2) El Niño induced famines during the Colonial period, and (3) Ethiopia between 1965 and 1997. Three factors stand out as common in each. Prior to each famine: (1) there were very few ways that people could obtain a living in the worst affected regions; (2) livelihoods in famine stricken communities came to depend on highly specialized agro-ecosystems that were sensitive to environmental change; (3) institutions failed to provide adequate safety nets to protect livelihoods from failure. This analysis suggests that vulnerability to climate change in food systems can be assessed by looking at agro-ecosystems, livelihoods and institutions. Local conditions, however, mean that ways of measuring these three factors will vary from place to place. As a result, direct comparisons are difficult. By conceptualizing these three variables as the axes of a three dimensional "vulnerability" space, it is possible to compare regions and look at trends over time by studying the paths through this "space" as traced by changes at the agroecosystem, livelihood, and institutional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]