PANTROPOCENE: Finding a Pre-industrial, Pan-tropical ‘Anthropocene’

Project Information

PANTROPOCENE

Grant agreement ID: 850709

DOI

10.3030/850709

Project closed

EC signature date 23 October 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 375,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 375,00

Coordinated by

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - PANTROPOCENE (PANTROPOCENE: Finding a Pre-industrial, Pan-tropical ‘Anthropocene’)

Reporting period: 2024-07-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Tropical forests are critical to the future of our species. By 2050, the tropics will be home to two thirds of the world’s human children. Meanwhile, tropical forests house over half of the Earth’s biodiversity, influence climate systems, and are critical to the carbon cycle. Combined effects of local deforestation can have regional and global feedbacks of relevance to all of us, including efforts to keep post-industrial warming below 2.0°C. Indeed, human actions in tropical forests are seen as a key part of the ‘Anthropocene’ - or the epoch in which humans have come to dominate the Earth System. Despite often stereotypically being considered ‘pristine’ blanks on the map of human history, emerging archaeological and historical evidence is highlighting the long-term and extensive nature of past social interactions with these environments.

This raises the question: could pre-industrial human land use change have resulted in significant Earth System feedbacks that have left legacies for the environments and societies of the present? Particularly notable in this regard are the potential effects of the arrival of European colonialism in the tropics, with pan-tropical empires, such as those of Iberia, seeking to control and exploit equatorial forests, flora, fauna, minerals, resources, and people. This, in turn, followed millennia of Indigenous forest management with possible implications for environments and the Earth System. Yet, to date, we have no concrete understanding of how pre-industrial impacts varied spatially and temporally, what they meant for local sustainability, and how they compare to modern human impacts.

The PANTROPOCENE project aimed to address this issue by taking the Spanish Empire as a frame of reference for innovatively combining archaeology, history, and environmental and Earth system science to develop ‘pan-tropical’ spatial assessments of pre-colonial, colonial, and industrial land use. PANTROPOCENE undertook novel environmental coring, remote sensing, archaeology, and archival work in the Philippine Archipelago, the often-neglected centre of the Spanish East Indies and novel, global trading networks, that can be compared to data from the Neotropics. These datasets were then used to develop historically-informed land use models which, in turn, can be applied within Earth System model experiments, to explore the spatial and temporal impacts of past tropical land use.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The PANTROPOCENE project began by producing a novel evaluation and critical review of past human interactions with plants, animals, and landscapes in the Philippines over the last 6,000 years, spanning pre-colonial trade centres through the arrival of Spanish colonialism. This output, published in the journal Holocene and now part of standard student curricula in the Philippines, provided the framework for the collection of new data for the project.

The PANTROPOCENE project undertook the first globe-spanning archival work relating to land use in the Philippines, Mexico, Spain and the USA, leading to a series of novel publications that explored crop preferences in the colonial period (International Journal of Historical Archaeology) and crop productivity, land area, output, and exports across the Philippines through time (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications). The project obtained new palaeoecological records, and proxy data from these records, from five different locations in the Philippine Archipelago, increasing available records for the past 2,000 years three-fold. In addition to the first pan-tropical assessment of human forest impacts during the colonial period published by the project team in Nature Ecology and Evolution, these novel records are being prepared for publication.

The project was also able to produce the first high-resolution LiDAR images of pre-colonial and colonial land use in different parts of the Philippines over the course of two field seasons. The PANTROPOCENE project also funded novel archaeological investigations, undertaken by local partners of the University of the Philippines, that are expanding insights into colonial history and have supported/are supporting the production of four different Masters theses of students in the Philippines. This work has underpinned training of students from the Philippines in different archaeological science methodologies (some of whom are continuing work in PhD programmes) and provides a key platform for a diversity of new projects in different parts of the Philippines moving forward.

PANTROPOCENE converted these novel primary archaeological, historical, and palaeoecological datasets into robust, bottom-up spatial estimations of land use for four different time periods in Philippines history. The novel framework developed was published in an Open Access article in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, with a focus on modelling the environmental impacts of the famous UNESCO Ifugao rice terraces. The project has also now produced the first land use categorisation and models for the entire Philippines for the four identified time periods, which are being prepared for publication. These land use models made scientific and technical advances and were discussed and co-produced with local scholars at a workshop in Manila in 2023. Finally, PANTROPOCENE has worked on developing workflows to incorporate such archaeological and historical land use, and land cover, datasets into Earth System models. Further publications produced by the project have already demonstrated how even broad historical, archaeological, and ethnographic insights can provide new, quantitative insights into the carbon (Plants, People, Planet) and fire risk (Journal of Urban Archaeology) consequences of past human activities, relevant for today.

Beyond its major scientific achievements PANTROPOCENE has also achieved major goals in the context of outreach. The PI wrote the popular book ‘Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World and Us’ (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320595/jungle-by-roberts-patrick/9780241990780). First, published in 2021 in the UK, and translated into multiple languages, the book represents a truly inter-disciplinary approach to tropical forests in the Earth’s history and highlights the significance of these ecosystems, and human interactions with them, in the public realm. PANTROPOCENE has also developed close connections with the Philippines heritage charity Tuklas and is working with local museums. The project website has also expanded to become the ‘Pantropica’ network for researchers working across the project, hosting podcasts and blogs from Early Career Researchers from around the tropics.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The PANTROPOCENE project has made major advances in the development of close ties between scholars from Germany and the Philippines, most notably between the Max Planck Society and the University of the Philippines. Exchange of knowledge is occurring in both directions and students and researchers from both countries are being trained in interdisciplinary approaches to human history in the tropics as well as the study of deep-time human-Earth system relationships. Collaborations with the University of the Philippines, as well as Ateneo University and Partido State University, are ensuring that the aims and results of the project are fit closely within core local academic interests and agendas. Further, lasting collaborative exchange is ongoing with workshops in the Philippines and Germany, research stays, and jointly-organised museum exhibits. The PI also maintains a Visiting Professorship with the University of the Philippines.

The results and methods applied across the project are already resulting in new grant applications focused on different parts of the Philippines and on comparing the Philippines to other contexts. Moreover, as can be seen above, the results have not just made significant discipline-specific contributions but have woven together to make transdisciplinary strides in systematic study of long-term human-Earth system interactions. The results of the project also have wide application, not only scientifically, but also across varied areas of society and policy, providing insights into historical legacies for climate risks, land use, and land cover in the Philippines and indeed around the latitudinal tropics more widely.

Ultimately, the approach developed within PANTROPOCENE is anticipated to be expanded to a pan-tropical level and to other regions of the world more widely. The project provides a framework for exploring how human actions, within different cultural and socioeconomic systems, have influenced environments and Earth system feedbacks, with consequences that can reverberate across generations. As a result, PANTROPOCENE represents a clear example of a successful attempt to make insights and datasets from the past practically relevant to contemporary considerations and discussions about sustainable futures of our species on local, regional, and global scales.

Logo of the Project

Map of the Extent of the Spanish Empire/Tropical Forest