Abstract
Climate disasters are now on the rise and more likely to increase in frequency and/or severity under climate change in the future. To clearly illustrate spatial–temporal distributions of climate disasters and the response of wheat yields to disasters over the past three decades, several disaster indices including the impact of climate disasters, the sensitivity to climate disasters and the response index of wheat yield losses to climate disasters were defined and calculated. The impact and sensitivity indices were examined by the agricultural production losses due to climate disasters, and the response of wheat yields to climate disasters was assessed by wheat yield loss compared with the 5-year moving average. The results showed that the indices of climate disaster impacts and sensitivities as well as response index of wheat yields to climate disasters could represent the spatial–temporal distributions of climate disasters well in the whole China. Droughts in northern China had higher impacts and sensitivities than those in southern China during the period 1983–2008, but the impacts of floods were opposite. In northern China, although impacted area by drought was larger than that by flood, the flood sensitivities were larger than drought sensitivities when flood happened. Although drought significantly affected wheat yields in most of the regions with drier conditions during 1983–2008 in major wheat-producing regions, better management practices like irrigation and drought-tolerant cultivars applied in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain can adapt to climate disasters especially droughts. To ensure the stability of agricultural production, future food security will need to be achieved through quantifying the relative effects of climate disasters and effective adaptation to increasingly frequent extreme climate events.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 41371002), the “Strategic Priority Research Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Climate Change: Carbon Budget and Relevant Issues, Grant No. XDA05090310, the National Program on Key Basic Research Project (Project No. 2010CB950902), and the State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System. We gratefully acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments, suggestions and language revisions.
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Shi, W., Tao, F. Spatio-temporal distributions of climate disasters and the response of wheat yields in China from 1983 to 2008. Nat Hazards 74, 569–583 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1197-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1197-1