Influence of Russia-Ukraine War on the Global Energy and Food Security
Introduction
The world is in a fragile state under the long-term pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic in each field such as energy and food (Kruczkiewicz et al., 2021). The Russian invasion of Ukraine, occurred between two main exporters of food and energy in the world would even worsen the global energy and food security (Mbah and Wasum, 2022). The Russia-Ukraine War (RUW) has actually induced roaring cereal and oil prices, and global inflation (Deng et al., 2022). Tollefson (2022) believed that although RUW has caused a short-term prices increase, it would be a chance to prompt a long-term shift towards energy sustainability.
Many academics, government officials and journalists have discussed the influence of RUW on energy and food security (Benton et al., 2022). However, they are mainly discussed based on expert judgment, without a suitable model analysis tool. The influence of RUW on energy and food are mostly explored in the regional level such as European Union (Blanchard and Pisani-Ferry., 2022), Morocc (Mengoub et al., 2022), Indian (Meena, 2022), Azerbaijan (Mammadov, 2022), China (Oxford Analytica, 2022a), Japan (Oxford Analytica, 2022b).
In the context of economic globalization, the supply and demand of food and energy between each country are closed linked (D'Odorico et al., 2018; Ruhl., 2019 Gaupp, 2020). The regional element corruption would cause global disaster in the complex network, which is called cascading failures (Lee and Goh., 2016). The cascading failures process has been revealed in the networks such as physical infrastructure networks (Guo et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2021), economic and finance network (Havlin and Kenett., 2015; Smolyak et al., 2018), and internet network (Xing, 2020; Ren et al., 2018). Take the economic trade network as an example, the cascading failures process can be described as below: Once a country has a supply or demand problem of a product, then a global cascading failure is triggered in the trade network due to the global economic trade relationship. The cascading failures types including edge-based-attack cascading failures and node-based-attack cascading failures (Li et al., 2012; Zhu et al., 2014). The simple occurrence mechanism is that under the initial attack, the load of the attacked node or edge would be distributed to its neighbors, and once the load of neighbors is larger compared with their load capacity, the neighbors are destroyed, and finally caused network cascading failure (Zhao et al., 2016). In some cases such as supply chain networks, the underload cascading failures process would be considered, which indicates that under the initial attack, due to lack of the load supply of the targeted node or edge, the load of the neighbors is reduced and once lower with the underload capacity, the neighbors are destroyed, and finally caused network cascading failure (Yang et al., 2021).
However, the cascading failures method is still few used in the research of global food or energy trade system, let alone the coupled food-energy system. The current cascading failures analysis barely consider the overload status and underload status at the same time. In the single food trade system, the lack of a main food exporter country would not cause food security risk of targeted importer countries, the food security risk of targeted importer countries would induce secondary food risk of other countries. So as the single energy trade system. What's more, due to the economic globalization, the basic primary industry-food system, and the basic secondary industry-energy system also have closed linkages, and have key influence on the whole economic system of a certain country. One system breakdown would cause the disruption of the other system. The cascading failures method is also a suitable tool to assess the influence of war on the global energy and food trade systems, which is still few can be found in the current research.
Academics have agreed that RUW would cause global food and energy crisis (Benton et al., 2022; Osendarp et al., 2022; Żuk and Żuk, 2022). However, there is still limited understanding of how RUW would influence the global energy and food security and ways to design an alternative means to mitigate the influence. To help address this gap, we construct a global energy and food network that includes approximately 238 countries, three main types of energy and three main types of cereals, so as the coupled energy and food networks. We create and improve an underload cascading failure with consideration of overload limitation to assess the influence of RUW on the global energy and food security. To fill the existing gap between knowledge and practice on this topic, a scenario analysis is also used to reveal the global energy and food security risks due to RUW through comparing different capacity and load change and coupling modes to answer some important questions: What would RUW bring to the global energy and food security? What is the cascading failure process caused by RUW? Which are the key and vulnerable countries that would be hurt by RUW? What are the best means to mitigate the influence of RUW? Our findings offer significant new insights that can reveal the impact degree of RUW and enable policymakers to identify potential solutions to this global crisis.
Section snippets
Global Network Data
According to the UN Comtrade Database, complex trade networks of energy and food covering all import and export flows occurring between 238 countries in 2020 have been developed. We downloaded data on “cereals” and “fossil fuels” on May 1st, 2020. To avoid double counting between exporter and importer, which named reporter and partner in the UN Comtrade Database, the information on the importers is extracted as import data are usually more accurate (Shi et al., 2021). Furthermore, in the energy
Global energy and cereals contribution of Russian and Ukraine
It can be found that Russian and Ukraine contributes 12.09% to the global energy trade, while Russian accounted for 12.01%. Fig. 2 shown that the countries with highest imports percentage from Russian were mostly located in the Europe and Asia. It also indicates that they may more easily been influenced by RUW. Focusing on specific energy types, it can be found that Russian and Ukraine contributes 15.60% to the global coal trade, 11.34% to the global oil trade and 10.00% to the global gas
Conclusions
This study established an improved under-load cascading failure model, and can support for assessment of risky and influence process in the energy cereals network due to Russian and Ukraine War.
Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Xi-Yin Zhou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Gang Lu: Writing – review & editing. Zhicheng Xu: Writing – review & editing. Xiaoqing Yan: Writing – review & editing. Soon-Thiam Khu: Conceptualization, Formal analysis. Junfeng Yang: Conceptualization, Formal analysis. Jian Zhao: Writing – review & editing, Project administration.
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
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC3201505) and the Major Science and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment (2017ZX07301-003).
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