Globally, regions experiencing pronounced impacts of 21st century anthropogenic warming are also those experiencing economic stress and social upheavals. Particularly vulnerable are agricultural societies in semi-arid regions (SARs) of emerging economies; several of such SARs societies have a colonial history and consequently, inherited colonial socioeconomic structures and practices. Over the past few decades, SARs in peninsular India, which are marked by significant variability in temperature and precipitation, have been experiencing frequent meteorological droughts; the magnitudes and spatial extent of these droughts have increased due to accelerating climate change. Combined with rapid population growth, expansion of water intensive cash crop agriculture and urban development, these droughts have emerged as major climatological stressors that have led to large-scale socioeconomic and human impacts, such as, crop failures, rural-urban migration and farmer suicides. However, it remains unclear how different local communities- people interacting with the natural world who bring with them their own practices, beliefs, and traditions that are interwoven into their experience of climate -- are being impacted by these rapid pace of change in the climate and affiliated systems.

Our objective here is to apply the social geosciences approach to gain a comprehensive understanding of the return period, causes impacts, risks and resilience of agricultural communities to droughts - especially dry conditions that persist for several years or even decades i.e. megadroughts.

Our methods are focussed on century-scale reconstruction and analysis of the history of drought and impacts in southern India with a goal to gain a comprehensive understanding of climate impacts in these semi-arid regions over the long-term i.e. longue duree. Below we list the steps

Step 1: Social scientists and practitioners in the group collect qualitative and quantitative information using Focus Group Discussions (FGD), surveys and Participatory Rural Appraisals (PAR) to understand how communities perceive risk and resilience and therefore adapt (or not) culturally to climate shocks.

Step 2: Historians in the group use historical (archived) institutional documents to generate records of social upheavals (e.g. famines, epidemics, displacement and human migration and anything else identified in step 1) as well as detailed records of economic and policy parameters (e.g agricultural patterns, land ownership, technology adoption and farming policy implementations) around each instance of social upheaval. Their goal is to understand the role of governance, economic and social structures in social upheavals that repeat over the longue duree.

Step 3: Climate scientists in the group reconstruct regional and local climate (rainfall, temperature and soil moisture) history using a combination of information extracted from human archives (historical documents) as well as natural archives (isotope based rainfall and temperature records from lake sediments). They then compare the climate records with the socioeconomic records (from step 2) to tease out climate attributes that are most predictive of periods of the social upheavals identified in the region over the longue duree .

Step 4: Earth scientists in the group reconstruct human impacts on environment and freshwater ecosystems during periods of social upheavals using proxy observations in preserved in sediment cores collected from lakes (e.g. changes in forest cover, land use changes, soil erosion and changes in water quality and lake levels and any other parameter identified in step 1). Their goal is to assess the role of human impacts on environmental resources in exacerbating or mitigating social upheavals.

Step 5: Together, the team compiles the socioeconomic, climatological and environmental information to gain a comprehensive understanding of risk and resilience of communities to droughts.

Step 6: Field practitioners then use appropriate communication strategies (also identified in step 1) to share the research results with the communities to and them craft culturally sensitive plans for sustainable management of natural resources for the future.

Since our questions are interdisciplinary, the project holds the promise for developing interdisciplinary research and enquiry methodologies, which would provide novel insights into our understanding of long-term nexus of climate and society, especially in agrarian economies.