An overview of assessment methods and analysis for climate change risk in China
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 On condition that the United States withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, the temperature rise would be up to about 3.2 °C, which was nearly 2 °C higher than the upper limit of 1.5 °C proposed in the Paris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].
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