Back in time
Famines in history
Famines recorded in Wikidata, every one with a Wikipedia article: from medieval Japan and Europe’s Great Famine of 1315 to Sudan and Gaza in this decade.
Open the live mapWhat you see
- Each famine as a teal disaster mark that stays on the map while it lasts.
- A page for each, with its dates and its Wikipedia summary.
- Opened from this page, the map plays 1700 to today.
Where the data comes from
- WikidataItems that are famines, with a date and a place.
Taken from Wikidata when the set is imported; it grows as Wikidata does.
Good to know
- A small set of 67, far from every famine, and no deaths are given; the article gives the toll.
- More than half are placed only at a country.
- Japan holds about one in six, many of them Edo-period famines.
The first recorded here in each century
- Yōwa famine1181 · Famine
- Kangi famine1230 · Famine
- Great Famine of 1315–13171315 · Famine
- Hungersnot der Jahre 1437–1439/401437 · Famine
- Tenbun famine1540 · Famine
- 1612 Moscow famineJan 1612 · Famine
- Grand famine of 17091709 · Famine
- Tenpō famine1833 · Famine
- Anno di carestia 19141914 · Famine
- 2005–2006 Niger food crisis2005 · Famine
Goes well with
Plague and epidemicsAbout 6,800 plague outbreaks in European towns from 1347 to 1900, from Biraben’s list, and about 400 epidemics from Wikidata, from 430 BCE to today.
Natural disasters since 1960About 9,900 floods, storms, earthquakes, landslides, droughts and heat and cold waves from 1960 to 2018 on one map, from the Geocoded Disasters dataset.
The world through historyAn interactive historical atlas: the world’s borders year by year from 3400 BCE, with wars, battles and other events from 7500 BCE, on a 3D globe.