TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wenz, Leonie
A1  - Kalkuhl, Matthias
A1  - Steckel, Jan Christoph
A1  - Creutzig, Felix
T1  - Teleconnected food supply shocks
JF  - Environmental research letters
N2  - The 2008-2010 food crisis might have been a harbinger of fundamental climate-induced food crises with geopolitical implications. Heat-wave-induced yield losses in Russia and resulting export restrictions led to increases in market prices for wheat across the Middle East, likely contributing to the Arab Spring. With ongoing climate change, temperatures and temperature variability will rise, leading to higher uncertainty in yields for major nutritional crops. Here we investigate which countries are most vulnerable to teleconnected supply-shocks, i.e. where diets strongly rely on the import of wheat, maize, or rice, and where a large share of the population is living in poverty. We find that the Middle East is most sensitive to teleconnected supply shocks in wheat, Central America to supply shocks in maize, and Western Africa to supply shocks in rice. Weighing with poverty levels, Sub-Saharan Africa is most affected. Altogether, a simultaneous 10% reduction in exports of wheat, rice, and maize would reduce caloric intake of 55 million people living in poverty by about 5%. Export bans in major producing regions would put up to 200 million people below the poverty line at risk, 90% of which live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results suggest that a region-specific combination of national increases in agricultural productivity and diversification of trade partners and diets can effectively decrease future food security risks.
KW  - food security
KW  - trade shocks
KW  - vulnerability
KW  - climate change
KW  - teleconnections
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/035007
SN  - 1748-9326
VL  - 11
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Geiger, Tobias
A1  - Frieler, Katja
A1  - Levermann, Anders
T1  - High-income does not protect against hurricane losses
JF  - Environmental research letters
N2  - Damage due to tropical cyclones accounts for more than 50% of all meteorologically-induced economic losses worldwide. Their nominal impact is projected to increase substantially as the exposed population grows, per capita income increases, and anthropogenic climate change manifests. So far, historical losses due to tropical cyclones have been found to increase less than linearly with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP). Here we show that for the United States this scaling is caused by a sub-linear increase with affected population while relative losses scale super-linearly with per capita income. The finding is robust across a multitude of empirically derived damage models that link the storm's wind speed, exposed population, and per capita GDP to reported losses. The separation of both socio-economic predictors strongly affects the projection of potential future hurricane losses. Separating the effects of growth in population and per-capita income, per hurricane losses with respect to national GDP are projected to triple by the end of the century under unmitigated climate change, while they are estimated to decrease slightly without the separation.
KW  - climate change
KW  - tropical cyclones
KW  - damage
KW  - meteorological extremes
KW  - vulnerability
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084012
SN  - 1748-9326
VL  - 11
PB  - IOP Publ. Ltd.
CY  - Bristol
ER  -