Christian Pfister (Swiss historian)

Pfister is regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of historical climatology. His research focuses on the social dimension of climate change and nature induced disasters, and the reconstruction of past weather and climate change from historical documents for the period before the use of instrumental measurements. He is particularly known for the further development of the Pfister climate indices, named after him, into a powerful instrument for the reconstruction of approximate values for temperatures and precipitation from historical documents. In this way, Pfister has succeeded in "connecting climate history with quantitative climate science. (...) The results obtained from Climate History, especially those concerning extreme events, contribute to improving risk assessment by broadening the basis of statistics." The project "European Palaeoclimate and Man since the Last Glaciation" of the "European Science Foundation" (1989) became important for historical climate research in the longer term. In this context, Pfister led a research group that gathered documentary data from all over Europe to reconstruct monthly weather charts for the period 1675–1715. In this context, he adapted the Climhist software package, developed for the documentation of the "Climate History of Switzerland" (1984), to create the European database Euro-Climhist. Since the 1990s, Pfister has gradually expanded and methodically refined the database. Today (2019), Euro-Climhist is the largest climate history database with over 200,000 records.

Concurrent to Climhist, Christian Pfister set up the BERNHIST regional history database from 1984. In 2009, the database contained around 1.5 million individual data from the fields of population, economy, environment and politics for the period from 1700 to the present. In 2019, a modernized version of BERNHIST was launched.

Both Christian Pfister’s dissertation (1974) and his habilitation thesis (1984) were committed to the histoire totale of the Annales School in addition to climate history. His focus on the Canton of Bern opened up a field of regional history that continued to occupy him in the years that followed. Through the fine division of its landscape, the Canton of Bern offers a patchwork of zones which followed different paths in their development. Pfister’s monograph "Im Strom der Modernisierung" (Bern, 1995) meets the methodological postulate of a histoire totale with extraordinary precision and spatial-temporal differentiation; and can be regarded as a material history in the best sense of the word, in which energy sources and food, agricultural production methods and their modernization appear just as much as the people who give birth, eat, work, argue, invent, try, age and die, and are not only processed into statistical series of numbers.

Pfister studied history and geography at the University of Bern from 1966 to 1970, where he graduated in 1974. This was followed by study visits to the University of Rochester and the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He habilitated in 1982. From 1990 to 1996, Pfister was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in his research on climate history. From 1997 until his retirement in 2009, he was Full Professor of Economic, Social and Environmental History at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern. For the first time, his professorship combined the three pillars of the sustainability discourse. Since 2009, he has been working as a freelance researcher at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Research at the University of Bern. His successor at the University of Bern in 2010 was Christian Rohr, who is now Professor of Environmental and Climate History. Pfister acted as founding president of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). In addition to climate history, he has made a name for himself in agricultural history, population history, regional history, the history of natural disasters and environmental history.

Based on its energy base (biomass, coal, oil, and gas), Pfister divides economic and environmental history into three fundamental social periods – agricultural society, industrial society and consumer society. His thesis is that the current urgency of the climate problem and the glut of plastic waste is due to the flooding of markets with cheap oil from the late 1950s onwards. The corresponding anthology (Pfister 1995b) experienced a second edition in 1996. An enlarged synthesis in English was published in 2010.

Christian Pfister (born 23 August 1944 in Bern) is a Swiss historian.

Since Erich Keyser’s Population History of Germany (Leipzig, 1938) no synthesis had been written for German speaking areas in the Early Modern Period. At the beginning of the 1990s, Christian Pfister took on the task of collecting and compiling a hardly comprehensible number of small-scale, at best regional and heterogeneous studies worked out over half a century, and to press them into the framework of a small volume of the Encyclopaedia of German History.

From 1882 to 1976, Switzerland was largely spared natural disasters. Pfister demonstrates that this "disaster gap" (German: Katastrophenlücke) contributed to natural risks being underestimated until the late 1980s. It was not until this time that natural disasters were discovered as an attractive topic in historical research. In his "Weather Hindcast" (1999), Pfister links the climate variations of the last five hundred years in Switzerland with the description of severe natural disasters. He postulates that natural disasters can be regarded as pacemakers of modernization and, at least in Switzerland, were fundamental for the development of a nationwide solidarity between the poor mountain regions and the wealthy regions in the Swiss Plateau. With these theses he succeeded in giving a new depth to the primarily cultural-historical discussion about the interpretation and perception of disasters. He has written several articles on natural disasters and, together with Christof Mauch, published an anthology on this topic in 2009.