Christian Pfister (Swiss historian)

Christian Pfister (born 23 August 1944 in Bern) is a Swiss historian. 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. 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of climate change and nature induced disasters, and the reconstruction of past weather and climate change from historical documents for the period before the use of instrumental measurements.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him, into a powerful instrument for the reconstruction of approximate values for temperatures and precipitation from historical documents.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.