CECSC studies how people have responded to climate change over time, and what those responses tell us about behaviour today. Six Romanian institutions and nine disciplines work on the same question: what makes people act?
The Centre studies how communities met rapid climate change across the Holocene, alongside instrumental records and climate projections to the end of this century.
Colours follow the CECSC stripe ramp: cool for the long record, warm for the present and projections. They are not a temperature scale. The axis is broken at 150 years ago so the last century and a half stays readable.
Research on climate mitigation and behaviour has usually looked at the habits of individuals in the present.
Europe is warming about twice as fast as the global average — faster than any other continent (WMO, 2023).
The IPCC (2022) finds that climate change has already pushed some ecosystems past thresholds beyond which change becomes abrupt and, in some cases, irreversible. Limiting warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels requires changes in how individuals, communities, industry, and governments behave, not only in technology.
Human communities have met rapid climate change before, and the record of how they coped is held in archaeological sites, bioarchaeological collections, linguistic archives, and paleoclimate proxies across Romania. Reading that record alongside modern climate science and psychology gives a fuller picture of what drives pro-environmental behaviour.
Human behaviour was at the core of past societal change. It is also the variable that decides whether mitigation works.
Three directions work on one question, each covering a different depth of time.
From the start of the Holocene, in the Lower Danube basin
Long-term evaluation of how human populations responded to climate change, using eco-archaeology, bioarchaeology, social history, ecolinguistics, and ethnology across the Lower Danube basin.
Read about History and CultureThe last 10,000 years, the last 150 years, and projections to 2100
Observational data, paleoclimate reconstructions, and high-resolution climate simulations, combined to link past and present climate with societal change.
Read about Climatic ImpactApplied to behaviour today and in the decades ahead
Past adaptability used to strengthen pro-environmental behaviour today, through tools that measure the determinants of climate-related behavioural change.
Read about Human BehaviourThe Centre brings researchers from these fields to work on the same question.
That is the isotope and geochemical laboratory the Centre is building at the University of Bucharest. Alongside it, the Centre is equipping laboratories across the consortium.
The research is designed to reach people outside academia.
Six packages, all led from the University of Bucharest.
Coordinated by Bogdan Antonescu
Administration, finance, risk and ethics.
Coordinated by Mihai Ducea
Builds the clean laboratory and the geochemical laboratory at the Faculty of Geology and Geophysics, then integrates them with the existing Petrochronology and stable isotope facilities at UB.
Coordinated by Mihai Constantinescu
Reconstructs lifestyle, diet, mobility, land use, and settlement strategy across the Holocene in the Lower Danube basin.
Coordinated by Mihai Dima
A paleoenvironmental database for Romania covering the last 20,000 years, the climatic footprint of the two modes of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, convection-permitting simulations up to 2100, and the impact of heatwaves and severe storms.
Coordinated by Eugen Avram
Adapts the Impact Chain model to historical adaptation data, collects Traditional Ecological Knowledge, designs a psychometric instrument, runs experiments driven by artificial intelligence, and tests a short Cognitive Behavioural Therapy protocol with immersive virtual reality.
Coordinated by Bogdan Antonescu
The website and social media, two international conferences, public seminars and videos, a network of climate change ambassadors, and the Climate Change Education Toolkit.
Coordinated by the University of Bucharest.
Coordinator (UB)
Research teams from the Faculties of Physics, Geology and Geophysics, History, Mathematics and Computer Science, Psychology and Education Sciences, and Letters. UB leads all six work packages.
Partner 1 (IFIN-HH)
Applied Nuclear Physics, Life and Environmental Sciences, and Nuclear Physics departments. Radiocarbon dating, accelerator mass spectrometry, ion beam analysis, X-ray computed tomography.
Partner 2 (IAVP)
Bioarchaeology department with its Anthropology, Zooarchaeology, and Palaeovegetation laboratories. Main contribution to WP3.
Partner 3 (INCDFP)
Applied Geophysics, Prevention and Education Laboratory (GeoEduLab). Diachronic spatial mapping of social-ecological systems, geophysical and UAV survey.
Partner 4 (UBB)
Geography, urban planning, psychology, informatics. High-resolution numerical modelling in WP4 and pro-environmental behaviour change studies in WP5.
Partner 5 (ARFCN)
“Sextil Pușcariu” Institute of Linguistics and Literary History and “George Barițiu” Institute of History. Eco-linguistics and historical analysis in WP3, WP4, and WP5.
