An overview of assessment methods and analysis for climate change risk in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pce.2020.102861Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Theoretical framework of climate change risk was formed based on hazard, vulnerability, and exposure.

  • Assessment methods of climate change risk and their applicability were systematically summarized.

  • Climate change risk levels were analyzed in sensitive sectors and key regions over China.

  • In China, impacts of climate change were more harm than benefit while more warming was very likely to aggravate the risk.

Abstract

Climate warming and subsequent climate extremes have a wide impact on ecosystems and economic society. Scientifically quantitative assessment on climate change risks is an urgent issue attracted the attention of academics and decision-makers. In this paper, the theory of climate change risks was sorted out based on the three component elements of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. Moreover, the idiomatic assessment methods and their applicability were systematically summarized. Comprehensive analysis found that the impacts of climate change generally showed a negative trend that was more harm than benefit, and further warming would aggravate the risk over China which was manifested to be more prominent in some sensitive sectors and key regions to climate change. Accessible management of the climate change risk should be engaged in effectively improving the methods of comprehensive identification, strengthening the mechanism and quantitative assessment, recognizing the temporal and spatial variation of components related to climate change risk, and reducing the uncertainty of climate change projection.

Introduction

In the past 100 years, the global climate was experiencing changes with warming as its main characteristic, and the scientific basis of climate change was conducted in our previous study (Chao and Feng, 2018). Some studies revealed that although the nationally determined contributions which pledged in the Paris Agreement were fully realized, the global average temperature in 2100 would still reach 2.8 °C higher than the pre-industrial level (Climate Action Tracker, 2017). On condition that the United States withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, the temperature rise would be up to about 3.2 °C, which was nearly 2 °C higher than the upper limit of 1.5 °C proposed in the Paris Agreement (Höhne et al., 2017; UNEP, 2017). Provided that the goal of maintaining the global temperature rise within the 2 °C threshold was achieved, the extent of warming would be varied in different regions, with a rapid increase in some regions where were sensitive to climate change (Huang et al., 2017; Raftery et al., 2017).

The intensity and frequency of extreme events, such as high temperature & heat wave, flood, and drought, were rapidly increasing nonlinearly due to climate warming, which caused a wide range of impacts on natural ecosystems and economic activities (Sanderson et al., 2017; Dosio and Fischer, 2018). What were worse, economic losses and mortalities were significantly increased due to global and regional climate change (Kundzewicz et al., 2014; Luo et al., 2018; Paprotny et al., 2018). From 1998 to 2017, the losses caused by global climate disasters exceeded 2 trillion US dollars, with the losses in China ranked second in the world (UNISDR, 2018). In the future, the losses would be likely to continually increase with more exposure of population and economic activities (Li et al., 2018b). As a result, humans were possible to be confronted with severe challenges of climate change risks in the future (Arnell, 2017; Pecl et al., 2017; Bonan and Doney, 2018). Aiming to adequately cognitive the climate change risk, the related theory and assessment methods was summarized as well as regional or fields’ analysis of climate change risk over China were conducted to enhance their perception, mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Section snippets

Theory of climate change risk

Climate change risk is an important scientific issue that needs to be acquainted urgently. The implications of climate change risk were deeply understood with the theory development of climate change risk at the cognitive, method, and practice levels (Chao et al., 2014). Based on relevant researches on climate change, climate change risk was defined as the potential adverse effects of climate change on natural and socioeconomic systems due to changes in the climate system that were caused by

Assessment methods of climate change risk and application

Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of climate change risk on the natural environment and human society is directed to cope with climate change. Based on the theory framework, assessment methods of climate change risk were summarized including hazard, vulnerability, and exposure (Table 1).

The risk of climate change over China

The impact of climate change on sensitive fields and key regions covered advantages and disadvantages. In China, the overall results indicated that the disadvantages of climate change outweighed the advantages. In particular, future projected results revealed that more warming would bring about a negative and aggravated risks (Committee on Report Board of China climate change assessment, 2015; Committee on Climate Change and China Expert Panel on Climate Change, 2018). In this paper, the

Prospects and suggestions

Based on the reviewing the methods and application of climate risk, results indicated that the assessment methods of climate change risk should take identification, integration, quantification and uncertainties into consideration. Hence, some prospects and suggestions are put forward to promote the theory development of climate change risk.

Conclusions

The risk of climate change is more deeply cognized through the gradual and long-term exploration. Based on the obtained results in extensive literatures, the development of the theory of climate change risk was sorted out including definition, characteristics and framework. Under the theoretical framework, the assessment methods of climate change risk and their applicability were systematically summarized in the component factors of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. Climate change risk was

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the research support of the National Key Technologies Research and Development Program of China [grant number 2018YFC1509002], the Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41901016], the UK-China Cooperation on Climate Change Risk Assessment, the China's Fourth Assessment on Climate Change, and the Climate Change Project of the China Meteorological Administration [grant number 2020101010YE028].

References (86)

  • D.P. van Vuuren et al.

    A proposal for a new scenario framework to support research and assessment in different climate research communities

    Global Environ. Change

    (2012)
  • T.L. Walton

    Distributions for storm surge extremes

    Ocean Eng.

    (2000)
  • G.F. Wang et al.

    An integrated analysis of agricultural water-use efficiency: a case study in the Heihe River Basin in Northwest China

    Phys. Chem. Earth

    (2015)
  • Y. Wang et al.

    Characteristics of drought vulnerability for maize in the eastern part of Northwest China

    Sci. Rep.

    (2019)
  • Q. Ye et al.

    Effects of climate change on suitable rice cropping areas, cropping systems and crop water requirements in southern China

    Agric. Water Manag.

    (2015)
  • S.A. Adachi et al.

    Contributions of changes in climatology and perturbation and the resulting nonlinearity to regional climate change

    Nat. Commun.

    (2017)
  • N. Arnell

    A Short Guide to Climate Change Risk

    (2017)
  • M. Boettle et al.

    How changing sea level extremes and protection measures alter coastal flood damages

    Water Resour. Res.

    (2013)
  • G.B. Bonan et al.

    Climate, ecosystems, and planetary futures: the challenge to predict life in Earth system models

    Science

    (2018)
  • S.J. Cao et al.

    Vulnerability of building contents to coastal flooding based on questionnaire survey in Hainan after typhoon Rammasun and Kalmeagi

    J. Catastrophol.

    (2016)
  • D. Chan et al.

    Projected shifts in Koppen climate zones over China and their temporal evolution in CMIP5 multi-model simulations

    Adv. Atmos. Sci.

    (2016)
  • Q.C. Chao et al.

    The evolvement of impact and adaptation on climate change and their implications on climate policies

    Adv. Clim. Change Res.

    (2014)
  • Y.M. Chen et al.

    Frequency analysis of extreme water levels affected by sea-level rise in east and southeast coasts of China

    J. Coastal. Res.

    (2014)
  • Z. Chu et al.

    Effects of climatic change on maize varieties distribution in the future of northeast China

    J. Appl. Meteorol. Sci.

    (2018)
  • Climate Action Tracker

    Improvement in warming outlook as India and China move ahead, but Paris Agreement gap still looms large[R]

  • A.S. Cohn et al.

    Cropping frequency and area response to climate variability can exceed yield response

    Nat. Clim. Change

    (2016)
  • Committee on Climate Change and China Expert Panel on Climate Change

    UK-China cooperation on climate change risk assessment: developing indicators of climate risk

  • Committee on Report Board of China Climate Change Assessment

    The Third China’s National Assessment Report on Climate Change

    (2015)
  • W. Cramer et al.

    Global response of terrestrial ecosystem structure and function to CO2 and climate change: results from six dynamic global vegetation models

    Global Change Biol.

    (2001)
  • Y.H. Ding et al.

    Special Report for the Third China's National Assessment Report on Climate Change: the Impact of Climate Change on Major Projects in China and Countermeasures

    (2016)
  • A. Dosio et al.

    Would half a degree make a difference? Robust projections of indices of mean and extreme climate in europe under 1.5 °C, 2 °C, and 3 °C global warming

    Geophys. Res. Lett.

    (2018)
  • V. Eyring et al.

    Taking climate model evaluation to the next level

    Nat. Clim. Change

    (2019)
  • Fema

    HAZUS-MH Flood Model: Technical Manual

    (2015)
  • A.Q. Feng et al.

    Assessing the inundation risk resulting from extreme water levels under sea-level rise: a case study of Rongcheng, China

    Geomatics, Nat. Hazards Risk

    (2018)
  • J.B. Gao et al.

    Theory paradigm and a methods system for research on climate change impacts and risks

    Acta Ecol. Sin.

    (2017)
  • S.N. Gosling et al.

    A global assessment of the impact of climate change on water scarcity

    Climatic Change

    (2016)
  • S. Hallegatte et al.

    Future flood losses in major coastal cities

    Nat. Clim. Change

    (2013)
  • S. Hallegatte et al.

    Building world narratives for climate change impact, adaptation and vulnerability analyses

    Nat. Clim. Change

    (2011)
  • S. Harrison et al.

    Climate change and the global pattern of moraine-dammed glacial lake outburst floods

    Cryosphere

    (2018)
  • N. Höhne et al.

    Action by China and India slows emissions growth, President Trump's policies likely to cause US emissions to flatten

    Clim. Act. Tracker

    (2017)
  • J.P. Huang et al.

    Drylands face potential threat under 2 °Cglobal warming target

    Nat. Clim. Change

    (2017)
  • IPCC

    He Third assessment report climate change 2001: synthesis report

    T

    (2001)
  • IPCC

    The Fourth assessment report climate change 2007: synthesis report

  • Cited by (21)

    • Risk assessment of climate change impacts on Mediterranean coastal wetlands. Application in Júcar River Basin District (Spain)

      2021, Science of the Total Environment
      Citation Excerpt :

      Hazard referred to the degree of a disaster, such as sea level rise projections, exposure referred to the land uses or environments exposed to hazard and vulnerability referred to the sensitivity of a system exposed to certain hazards as well as its inherent characteristics, such as its response, resistance, and resilience ability. Feng and Chao (2020) develop a risk assessment and affirm that water resources in the northwest and north of China which are in high risk will be a source of concern in the next decades. Gussmann and Hinkel (2021) highlight that the integration of sea-level rise considerations into the adaptation policy would improve the effectiveness.

    • Index for climate change adaptation in China and its application

      2021, Advances in Climate Change Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      Emerging attention has been paid to indicator application for evaluating adaptation success (Arnott et al., 2016). Literature evaluated the adaptation progress using a single or comprehensive index and through model simulation from social, natural, and economic dimensions based on the qualitative description (Feng and Chao, 2020; Liu et al., 2019a; Wu, 2019). For example, Chen et al. (2011) selected four systems of economy, agriculture, society, as well as resources and environment to be the evaluation subjects, established an index system for the regional climate system, and evaluate the climate change adaptation of Xianyang city.

    • An overview of climate change impacts on the society in China

      2021, Advances in Climate Change Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      Based on the retrieval, analysis and summary of published literature (Deng et al., 2019; ECTNRCCC, 2015; Fan et al., 2020; Guo et al., 2020; Kong et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2018; Mei et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2016a, b; Zhang et al., 2018a; Zhou et al., 2020), and with reference to experts' opinions, the risk levels of each sector in different regions are given. For the attribution levels, we follow the results of Feng and Chao (2020), and the risk levels we proposed here are slightly different from their conclusions. We think the risks of agriculture and transportation in Northwest China have a higher level than their results, so are the risks of livelihoods and public health in Southwest China, but with the same spatial pattern.

    • Soil microbial community dynamics mediate the priming effects caused by in situ decomposition of fresh plant residues

      2020, Science of the Total Environment
      Citation Excerpt :

      Extreme weather events, such as freezing damage and tornados (Feng and Chao, 2020; Field et al., 2014), have a huge impact on forest ecosystems (Parker et al., 2018; Yousefpour et al., 2019).

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text