Navigating Polycrisis: long-run socio-cultural factors shape response to changing climate

These data are part of a data portal that accompanies the special issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture,’ published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 2023. To access the data portal, please visit 10.5061/dryad.bnzs7h4h4. We have systematically collected information about the nature and consequences of societal crisis in over 150 cases covering different regions in the world in the preindustrial period. In this contribution, we discuss some critical insights arising from initial analysis of this material, which has informed the basis of our work.