Climate Risk Assessment and Adaptation

CEADs Team Develops Disaster Footprint Model to Reveal Cascading Global Losses from Extreme Heat to Hum

Research Background Driven by global warming, extreme heatwave events are becoming more frequent, widespread, and intense, with severe impacts on human health and productivity. Worker attendance and work efficiency in high-temperature environments are affected, reducing effective working hours and productivity. As collaboration across global value chains becomes increasingly close, economic losses in regions affected by extreme heatwave...

CEADs Study: Assessing the Economic Impacts of Compound Disasters from Extreme Weather, Pandemic Contro

The global economy is currently facing multiple challenges, including pandemics, global warming, and geopolitical trade frictions. Compared with a single hazard, a compound "perfect storm" of different hazards is more likely to exceed the coping capacity of any individual system, trigger nonlinear socioeconomic impacts, and spread across wider regions through global supply chains. The CEADs team recently published a paper in the Q1 jour...

Supply chains create global benefits from improved vaccine accessibility

Ensuring a more equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide is an effective strategy to control global pandemics and support economic recovery. We analyze the socioeconomic effects - defined as health gains, lockdown-easing effect, and supply-chain rebuilding benefit - of a set of idealized COVID-19 vaccine distribution scenarios. We find that an equitable vaccine distribution across the world would increase global economic benefits by ...

Assessing the economic impacts of future fluvial flooding in six countries under climate change and soc

Floods are among the most frequent and costliest natural hazards. Fluvial flood losses are expected to increase in the future, driven by population and economic growth in flood-prone areas, and exacerbated in many regions by effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle. Yet, studies assessing direct and indirect economic impacts of fluvial flooding in combination with climate change and socio-economic projections at a country leve...

Economic impacts of climate-induced crop yield changes: evidence from agri-food industries in six count

The potential impact of climate change on agriculture has been one of the most discussed topics in the literature on climate change. Although the possible impacts of climate change on crop yields have been widely studied, there remains little quantitative understanding of the heterogeneous economic responses to climate-induced crop yield changes in different economies, particularly at higher levels of warming. This study assesses the eco...

Economic footprint of California wildfires in 2018

Recent increases in the frequency and scale of wildfires worldwide have raised concerns about the influence of climate change and associated socioeconomic costs. In the western United States, the hazard of wildfire has been increasing for decades. Here, we use a combination of physical, epidemiological and economic models to estimate the economic impacts of California wildfires in 2018, including the value of destroyed and damaged capita...

Role of export industries on ozone pollution and its precursors in China

This study seeks to estimate how global supply chain relocates emissions of tropospheric ozone precursors and its impacts in shaping ozone formation. Here we show that goods produced in China for foreign markets lead to an increase of domestic non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) emissions by 3.5 million tons in 2013; about 13% of the national total or, equivalent to half of emissions from European Union. Production for export...

Methodology and application of flood footprint accounting in a hypothetical multiple two-flood event

Multiple natural disasters are becoming ever more frequent around the world, with both climate change and rapid urbanization increasing the risk of such disasters in human society. Comprehensive analysis of the economic impact of multiple disasters on the industrial and economic system has become an urgent and essential part of urban recovery and sustainable development. However, there is a lack of studies that focus on assessing the in...

Quantity and quality of China's water from demand perspectives

China is confronted with an unprecedented water crisis regarding its quantity and quality. In this study, we quantified the dynamics of China's embodied water use and chemical oxygen demand (COD) discharge from 2010 to 2015. The analysis was conducted with the latest available water use data across sectors in primary, secondary and tertiary industries and input–output models. The results showed that (1) China's water crisis was allevi...

The slowdown in global air-pollutant emission growth and driving factors

Fine-particulate-matter pollution (PM 2.5 ) is linked to millions of deaths annually. Consumption in one region can cause production and PM 2.5 emissions in another, but the socioeconomic drivers of transboundary PM 2.5 emissions are not fully understood. Here, we quantify the driving factors of primary-particle and oxidized-precursor emissions from 2004 to 2011 at global and regional scales. The results indicate that the growth rate of...