Climate Adaptation and Resilience Lessons in Africa’s History

Understanding how past societies adapted to environmental changes is crucial for addressing today’s challenges, particularly those related to climate change, food security, and sustainable livelihoods.

A study revealed how Africans have adapted to their changing climate in the past 10,000 years. Between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago, the continent experienced an African Humid Period (AHP), characterised by a wetter climate. However, as drier conditions emerged around 5,000 years ago, a significant shift occurred in environmental, social, and cultural aspects across the continent.

The findings of the study, “Africa-wide diversification of livelihood strategies: Isotopic insights into Holocene human adaptations to climate change”, published in One Earth Journal on 20 June 2025 delves into the climate adaptation measures Africans took in the face of climate variability in the last 10,000 years and how the different livelihood practices they took have become key to their survival and helped shaped their long-term resilience. This is the first study to explore thousands of years of change in people’s livelihoods across the continent using isotopic data.

Isotopic clues: What ancient diets reveal about livelihoods  

The authors developed their insights by analysing stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in ancient human and domestic animal bones, teeth, and other tissues from 187 archaeological sites across the African continent, to help them determine what they ate in the past as well as the environments in which they lived.  

Carbon isotope values from ancient human and domestic animal materials can reveal their diets, indicating whether they were part of a food web based on C3 plants or C4 plants. C4 plants occur primarily in open ecosystems, whereas C3 plants occur across closed (forest and thicket) and open (grass- and shrub-dominated) ecosystems and many heavily cultivated areas.

Nitrogen isotope values can provide clues about diet—for example, whether someone primarily consumed plants, animals, or fish —and about habitats, as nitrogen levels in the environment are influenced by factors such as soil type, temperature, and moisture.

Because there’s often a lot of variation in isotope values, scientists need to use other evidence, such as archaeological or ecological data, to accurately interpret what the isotope results reveal about past diets and environments.

Blended strategies: How communities built climate resilience

The results enable scientists to describe their livelihoods, whether it is pastoralism, cultivation, hunting and gathering, or fishing. This reconstruction work gave a clearer picture of how African livelihoods changed and adapted over thousands of years.

The study shows that African communities adapted by combining herding, farming, fishing, and foraging, rather than focusing on a single type of livelihood or relying on intensive agriculture. They blended different practices based on what worked at various times in their specific environment, and this practice is key to climate resilience.

For instance, in what are now Botswana and Zimbabwe, some communities combined small-scale farming with wild food gathering and livestock herding after the African Humid Period. In Egypt and Sudan, people practised mixed farming—growing wheat, barley, and legumes—alongside fishing, dairy production, and beer brewing.

This flexible understanding of livelihoods enables researchers to study how people have utilised land and adapted over time. It also allows comparisons across different regions and time periods, making it useful for interdisciplinary research.

Lessons for today: Adaptation, food security, and sustainability

Studying livelihoods at the continental scale helps us understand how people interacted with climate and vegetation across Africa. It demonstrates how they developed strategies to cope with environmental change and can offer valuable lessons for addressing today’s challenges, such as climate adaptation and food security.

Read the full study: Africa-wide diversification of livelihood strategies: Isotopic insights into Holocene human adaptations to climate change