El Niño amplified food insecurity in early modern Europe

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a dominant source of global inter annual climate variability, yet its long-term influence on food security remains poorly understood. Drawing on a recently compiled dataset of 160 European famines and a new high-resolution ENSO reconstruction, we show a robust correspondence between positive ENSO anomalies (El Niño events) and subsistence crises during the early modern period (1500–1800). These anomalies increased the probability of famine onset in Central Europe – the European region that we find most teleconnected with ENSO variability – where we estimate that more than 40% of famine onsets are associated with El Niño events. To explain this finding, we establish a pathway in which positive ENSO anomalies are revealed (1) to be associated with excessive summer wetness and (2) consequently reduced grain harvests. We further show that ENSO effects on famine duration were even more widespread: El Niño events increased the annual likelihood of famine persistence by 24% in all nine European regions for which data are available. To explain this finding, we study grain price data and show that ENSO-induced climate variability drove grain prices up by 6.5% after one year – even in non-teleconnected locations. We posit that this outcome is consistent with significant market integration that allowed climate-related shocks to propagate across the continent. We further show that these grain price shocks spilled over to other subsistence goods, such as fish, an effect we attribute to demand substitution given the lack of apparent ENSO influence on European and North Atlantic marine environments. Collectively, these results provide novel and robust evidence for the influence of mechanisms of global climate variability on regional food security during the early modern period in Europe