Abstract
One of the effects of global climate change is increase in the frequency and severity of drought, which strongly affects the Chinese agricultural production. In order to cope these changes more effectively, it is important to document and analyze the agricultural losses caused by drought. We collected and analyzed conventional meteorological data and agricultural statistics data, in order to outline trends in drought occurrence and decline in agricultural yield. Data were assembled for the period 1960–2010. The study pays particular attention to regional differences between northern and southern China. Our results show the drought-caused agricultural loss rates (DCALR) in China have increased by approximately 0.5% per decade in the past 50 years. The study area in this paper is for the whole of the People’s Republic of China, minus the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau; when we analyzed regional differences, we found that losses increased by approximately 0.6% per decade in northern China, close to twice the increase in southern China. Moreover, drought risks and agricultural losses are rising faster in northern China. Our results also indicate that the agriculture in northern China is more sensitive to changes in precipitation, whereas the agriculture in southern China is more sensitive to temperature changes.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Key Research and Development (973) Program of China 2013CB430206 and the National Natural Science Key Foundation of China (41630426). Q. Z. wrote the main manuscript text, L. Y. H. analyzed the data and created the plots by using the Origin 8.0 software and maps with Arcmap9.3 (Figs. 1 and 8); J. J. L. and Q. Y. C. collected the data, and J. J. Y. edited the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript.
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Zhang Qiang, Han Lanying, Lin Jingjing, and Cheng Qingyan contributed equally to this work
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Qiang, Z., Lanying, H., Jingjing, L. et al. North–south differences in Chinese agricultural losses due to climate-change-influenced droughts. Theor Appl Climatol 131, 719–732 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-016-2000-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-016-2000-x