Social impacts of historical climate change and human adaptation are one of the hotspots in the current global change research. In recent years,utilizing the abundant historical literatures,new progress on the interaction mechanisms and processes within the human-climate-ecosystem complex in China during the past 2000 years,has been achieved. It could be summarized as follows: Firstly,a concept model of impact and response of historical climate change in China based on food security has been built;Secondly,a series of historical social-economic series on the base of semantic differential to serve the research on impacts of climate change have been quantitatively reconstructed;Thirdly,the general characteristics of the impacts of historical climate change could be summarized as negative in the cold periods and positive in the warm periods,with time and space differences in the impact and responses.In the future,the studies on historical climate impacts should be focused on spatial and temporal diversification,regional comprehensive analysis and comparison,and multidiscipline integration.