Spatio-temporal distributions of climate disasters and the response of wheat yields in China from 1983 to 2008

Wenjiao Shi () and Fulu Tao

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 74, issue 2, 569-583

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. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Climate change; Wheat yield; Drought; Impact; Sensitivity; Response (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-014-1197-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:74:y:2014:i:2:p:569-583

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-014-1197-1

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().