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Climate change impacts on socioeconomic damages from weather-related events in China

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Abstract

China is vulnerable to climate change impacts, and this study investigates the potential socioeconomic damages to China from weather-related events under future climate conditions. A two-part model incorporating a hierarchical Bayesian approach is employed to explore the effects of climate on human damage (the share of affected people in a total population) and economic damage (the share of economic losses in gross domestic product). Based on these relationships, the relative changes in socioeconomic damages under representative concentration pathways (RCPs) are presented at the regional and national levels. Our results show that China would experience an increase in socioeconomic damages from rainfall-related events under RCP2.6 and RCP4.5, and the higher increments mainly appear in the central and southwestern areas. Future climate conditions may greatly increase national damages from drought events under RCP8.5. Damages in some northern and southeastern provinces could double by 2081–2090. The national damage to humans from cold-related events is almost unchanged in most climate scenarios; however, the associated economic damage has downtrends.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for financial support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0602603) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Nos. 71704009 and 71521002). For their roles in producing, coordinating, and making available the ISI-MIP model output, we acknowledge the modeling groups (HadGEM2-ES, IPSL-CM5A-LR, MIROC-ESM-CHEM, GFDL-ESM2 M, and NorESM1-M) and the ISI-MIP coordination team. We also appreciate the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful and constructive comments that substantially improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xiao-Chen Yuan

  2. Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xiao-Chen Yuan

  3. Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Xun Sun

  4. Columbia Water Center, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Xun Sun

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  1. Xiao-Chen Yuan
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  2. Xun Sun
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Correspondence to Xiao-Chen Yuan.

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Yuan, XC., Sun, X. Climate change impacts on socioeconomic damages from weather-related events in China. Nat Hazards 99, 1197–1213 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-019-03588-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-019-03588-2

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