Not a week seems to go by without news of a catastrophic flood, drought, wildfire, or other extreme climatic event somewhere in the world. In Asia, the region of Indochina and South China (INCSC) is no exception. Like the recent catastrophic floods in South China's Guangdong Province, which killed at least four people and left many more missing, heavy precipitation and extreme drought have taken their toll.
Beyond the human cost, the economic impact can be brutal; in the case of the Guangdong floods, for example, the direct economic loss was more than 346 million yuan (nearly $50 million). Given that the parts of the INCSC region with the highest gross domestic product (GDP) tend to be located along the coastline, where the effects of global warming are felt most acutely, it is imperative to understand the likely future economic impacts as we move into an even warmer world.
With this in mind, in a study published in
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on May 18, a cross-disciplinary team of researchers led from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences used data from state-of-the-art climate models to investigate future projections of precipitation extremes and their impact on GDP in the INCSC region under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fossil-fuelled development pathway - one of several possible future climate change scenarios of socioeconomic change.
What they found has important implications not only for the INCSC region as a whole, but also for specific areas within the region where the impacts are likely to be felt most acutely.
"Looking only at the impact of climate change on GDP, the future changes in heavy precipitation and extreme drought in the INCSC region projected by climate models will have the greatest economic impact in provinces such as Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan in South China, and the Malay Peninsula and southern Cambodia in Indochina," said Dr. HU Wenting of IAP, corresponding author of the study.
It is clear, then, that while climate models show that heavy precipitation will intensify and dry spells will lengthen across the entire INCSC region, when we dig down into the sub-regional details of the economic consequences of these changes, certain areas will need to design and implement adaptation strategies tailored to the particular future they face.
The 2015 Paris Agreement challenged the world to keep the rise in global surface temperature to well below 2 ℃, and preferably no more than 1.5 ℃. If this can be achieved, regional impacts of climate change such as those uncovered in the INCSC region in this study could be avoided. Not only that, but in the other direction, from the regional scales to the global scale, there is now evidence to suggest that extreme daily precipitation and heatwaves, for example, can have a significant impact on global economic growth. This, say the authors of the current study, is an important aspect to explore in the next steps of this line of research.
Panoramic view of Bangkok from a meterological tower. The coastal region in Indochina is vulnerable to climate change. (Photo by HU Wenting)