Environment & Energy

Multiple crop failures, cold rainy weather across much of the continent and widespread hunger and disease.

There's pretty substantial historical consensus that that revolutions of 1848 were driven in part by failures of government to deal with these crises.

Ireland was the extreme manifestation of that decade - monoculture, horrible endemic poverty based on centuries of English occupation and export of nearly all crops other than potatoes (exports which continued right through the famine).