Trigger or driver? Tracing the role of climate variability since the Little Ice Age in the abandonment of mountain villages in the Eastern Pyrenees: evidence from historical documents

Mercè Cisneros Bermejo , Dr Agustí Esteban-Amat, Jordi Ibáñez-Insa, Josep Barriendos, Mariano Barriendos, Cristina Simó, Claudi Aventín-Boya, Javier Sigró, Òscar Jané

In recent decades, rural depopulation has emerged as a widespread phenomenon across much of Europe, driven by shared underlying processes but shaped by region-specific dynamics. Understanding how climate variability interacts with socioeconomic dynamics to drive long-term settlement abandonment is critical in the context of current global change. High-mountain regions are particularly sensitive to environmental and social pressures, yet long-term empirical evidence remains limited.
This study analyzes 307 abandoned or uninhabited villages out of 1,214 documented settlements in the Eastern Pyrenees (Catalan and Aranese sector) between 1275 and 2024, based on systematic examination of historical records. Abandonment drivers were classified into natural hazards (geological, climatic, and biological), anthropogenic factors (socioeconomic and geopolitical/historical), and unknown causes, allowing a long-term assessment of climate–society interactions across the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the Industrial Era (IE).
Anthropogenic factors dominate overall, accounting for 78.2% of abandonment cases, whereas natural hazards represent 12.7%. Although natural hazards played a relatively greater role during the LIA, abandonment peaked during the IE, driven primarily by socioeconomic transformations such as rural exodus, declining accessibility, and economic restructuring.
Climate rarely acted as a direct driver but contributed to approximately 15% of cases, often interacting with other stressors. Periods of increased abandonment frequently followed phases of climatic deterioration, suggesting a lagged and indirect influence. These results indicate that climate variability functioned mainly as a vulnerability multiplier rather than as an independent cause of settlement decline.
Overall, the present findings challenge deterministic interpretations linking climate directly to depopulation. Instead, they highlight that settlement persistence depended primarily on adaptive capacity and socioeconomic context. This long-term perspective provides a transferable framework for understanding how climate–society interactions shape settlement dynamics and emphasizes that the risk under contemporary climate change also lies in its interaction with existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities.