Drought may cost China US$47 billion a year as temperatures rise, study finds
Researchers say economic losses will more than double if the global average goes up by 1.5 degrees – and a 2-degree increase would be significantly worse
Drought conditions could cost China US$47 billion per year in economic losses – more than double the current estimate – if global temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline, according to a Chinese study.
Those losses could climb a lot higher – to US$84 billion, or about five times this year’s level – if the global average temperature goes up by 2 degrees, Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers found.
Their study, published in US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, projected China’s economic losses from drought under the two rising temperature scenarios, using climate data from 31 provinces over the three decades from 1986 to 2015.
The two scenarios were based on the target set by the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
“Drought losses have significantly increased in recent years across the globe,” said Jiang Tong, lead author of the study and a researcher with the National Climate Centre at the China Meteorological Administration in Beijing. “[But] most projections agree that the warming rate of China will be faster than the global mean.”