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Biewald, A., Lotze-Campen, H., Otto, I., Brinckmann, N., Bodirsky, B., Weindl, I., et al. (2015). The Impact of Climate Change on Costs of Food and People Exposed to Hunger at Subnational Scale (Vol. 128). Potsdam.
Abstract: Climate change and socioeconomic developments will have a decisive impact on people exposed to hunger. This study analyses climate change impacts on agriculture and potential implications for the occurrence of hunger under different socioeconomic scenarios for 2030, focusing on the world regions most affected by poverty today: the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We use a spatially explicit, agroeconomic land-use model to assess agricultural vulnerability to climate change. The aims of our study are to provide spatially explicit projections of climate change impacts on Costs of Food, and to combine them with spatially explicit hunger projections for the year 2030, both under a poverty, as well as a prosperity scenario. Our model results indicate that while average yields decrease with climate change in all focus regions, the impact on the Costs of Food is very diverse. Costs of Food increase most in the Middle East and North Africa, where available agricultural land is already fully utilized and options to import food are limited. The increase is least in Sub-Saharan Africa, since production there can be shifted to areas which are only marginally affected by climate change and imports from other regions increase. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa can partly adapt to climate change, in our model, by modifying trade and expanding agricultural land. In the Middle East and North Africa, almost the entire population is affected by increasing Costs of Food, but the share of people vulnerable to hunger is relatively low, due to relatively strong economic development in these projections. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the Vulnerability to Hunger will persist, but increases in Costs of Food are moderate. While in South Asia a high share of the population suffers from increases in Costs of Food and is exposed to hunger, only a negligible number of people will be exposed at extreme levels. Independent of the region, the impacts of climate change are less severe in a richer and more globalized world. Adverse climate impacts on the Costs of Food could be moderated by promoting technological progress in agriculture. Improving market access would be advantageous for farmers, providing the opportunity to profitably increase production in the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, but may lead to increasing Costs of Food for consumers. In the long-term perspective until 2080, the consequences of climate change will become even more severe: while in 2030 56% of the global population may face increasing Costs of Food in a poor and fragmented world, in 2080 the proportion will rise to 73%.
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Piontek, F., Müller, C., Pugh, T. A., Clark, D. B., Deryng, D., Elliott, J., et al. (2014). Multisectoral climate impact hotspots in a warming world. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 111(9), 3233–3238.
Abstract: The impacts of global climate change on different aspects of humanity’s diverse life-support systems are complex and often difficult to predict. To facilitate policy decisions on mitigation and adaptation strategies, it is necessary to understand, quantify, and synthesize these climate-change impacts, taking into account their uncertainties. Crucial to these decisions is an understanding of how impacts in different sectors overlap, as overlapping impacts increase exposure, lead to interactions of impacts, and are likely to raise adaptation pressure. As a first step we develop herein a framework to study coinciding impacts and identify regional exposure hotspots. This framework can then be used as a starting point for regional case studies on vulnerability and multifaceted adaptation strategies. We consider impacts related to water, agriculture, ecosystems, and malaria at different levels of global warming. Multisectoral overlap starts to be seen robustly at a mean global warming of 3 °C above the 1980-2010 mean, with 11% of the world population subject to severe impacts in at least two of the four impact sectors at 4 °C. Despite these general conclusions, we find that uncertainty arising from the impact models is considerable, and larger than that from the climate models. In a low probability-high impact worst-case assessment, almost the whole inhabited world is at risk for multisectoral pressures. Hence, there is a pressing need for an increased research effort to develop a more comprehensive understanding of impacts, as well as for the development of policy measures under existing uncertainty.
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