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Global food markets, trade and the cost of climate change adaptation

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Abstract

Achieving food security in the face of climate change is a major challenge for humanity in the 21st century but comprehensive analyses of climate change impacts, including global market feedbacks are still lacking. In the context of uneven impacts of climate change across regions interconnected through trade, climate change impact and adaptation policies in one region need to be assessed in a global framework. Focusing on four Eastern Asian countries and using a global integrated modeling framework we show that i) once imports are considered, the overall climate change impact on the amount of food available could be of opposite sign to the direct domestic impacts and ii) production and trade adjustments following price signals could reduce the spread of climate change impacts on food availability. We then investigated how pressure on the food system in Eastern Asia could be mitigated by a consumer support policy. We found that the costs of adaptation policies to 2050 varied greatly across climate projections. The costs of consumer support policies would also be lower if only implemented in one region but market price leakage could exacerbate pressure on food systems in other regions. We conclude that climate adaptation should no longer be viewed only as a geographically isolated local problem.

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  1. http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds314.0/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Schlossplatz 1, 2361, Laxenburg, Austria

    Aline Mosnier, Michael Obersteiner, Petr Havlík, Nikolay Khabarov, Hugo Valin, Stefan Frank & Franziska Albrecht

  2. University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Feistmantelstraße 4, 1180, Vienna, Austria

    Aline Mosnier & Erwin Schmid

  3. Asian Development Bank, 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550, Philippines

    Michael Westphal

  4. Abt Associates, 4550 Montgomery Avenue, Suite 800 North, Bethesda, MD, 20814-3343, USA

    Michael Westphal

  5. University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010, Vienna, Austria

    Franziska Albrecht

Authors
  1. Aline Mosnier
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  2. Michael Obersteiner
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  3. Petr Havlík
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  7. Hugo Valin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aline Mosnier.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Methodology

GLOBIOM’s 31 regions

ANZ: Australia, New Zealand; Brazil; Canada; China; Congo Basin: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon; Eastern Africa: Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda; EU Baltic: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; EU Central East: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia; EU Middle West: Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands; EU North: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, United Kingdom; EU South: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain; Former USSR: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan; India; Japan; Mexico; Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen; Mongolia; Pacific Islands: Fiji Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu; RCAM: Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Netherland Antilles, Panama, St Lucia, St Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago; RCEU: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia-Montenegro; ROWE: Gibraltar, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland; RSAM: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela; RSAS: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka; RSEA OPA: Brunei Daressalaam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand; RSEA PAC: Cambodia, Korea DPR, Laos, Viet Nam; South Africa; South Korea; Southern Africa: Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Reunion, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe; Turkey; United States of America (USA); Western Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo .

Fig. 4
figure 4

Changes in the Climate Moisture Index (CMI) with respect to historical climate (2046–2055 vs. 1961–1990, A2 emissions scenario) show positive values for wetter climates and negative values of drier climates. The spatial resolution of the climate data from the GCMs was 1°. The ranking of the models for CMI was done by total area-weighting averages for the global and Northeast Asian countries

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Fig. 5
figure 5

Food demand projections in GLOBIOM: average calorie consumption per capita per day (on the vertical axis) in Northeast Asian countries and the evolution of diet composition. RMMEAT refers to ruminant meat, MGMEAT refers to monogastric meat, and OSDVOL refers to oilseeds. Only GLOBIOM-modeled products are included (Table 1)

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Table 1 Correspondence between food commodity categories and single products in GLOBIOM
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Appendix 2: Methodology to assess the biophysical impact of climate change on crop calorie food availability in a region

Indexes:

  • r: region

  • r1: importing region

  • r2: exporting region

  • c: crop

  • m: management system

  • a: simulation unit

  • s: climate scenario in 2050 (s0 if historical climate)

Parameters:

  • Prod: impact of climate change on the regional production in tons

  • AreaInit: cultivated area in 2000 in hectares

  • Yield: crop yield in ton per hectare

  • Trade: bilateral trade flow from region r1 to region r2 in tons

  • Imports: total imports of a region in tons

  • Conso: food consumption in tons

  • α: share of the domestic production in regional food consumption

  • β: share of the import from region r2 in total imports of region r1

  • Cal: calorie content of a crop

  • FoodAv: total food availability from crops in a region in calories

  • ∆ is used to indicate the relative change of a parameter.

We first compute the average impact of climate change on the regional production:

  1. (1)
    $$ Pro{d}_{r,c,s}={\displaystyle {\sum}_{a,m} AreaIni{t}_{r,a,c,m}* Yiel{d}_{r,a,c,m,s}} $$
  2. (2)
    $$ \varDelta \boldsymbol{Pro}{\boldsymbol{d}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{c},\boldsymbol{s}}=\frac{\boldsymbol{Pro}{\boldsymbol{d}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{c},\boldsymbol{s}}}{\boldsymbol{Pro}{\boldsymbol{d}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{c},\boldsymbol{s}\mathbf{0}}} $$

Then we compute the average impact of climate change on the imports:

  1. (3)
    $$ {\beta}_{r1,r2,c}=\frac{ Trad{e}_{r2,r1,c}}{{\displaystyle {\sum}_{r2}} Trad{e}_{r2,r1,c}} $$
  2. (4)
    $$ Import{s}_{r1,c,s}={\displaystyle {\sum}_{r2}{\beta}_{r1,r2,c}\cdot Trad{e}_{r2,r1,c}\cdot \Delta Pro{d}_{r2,c,s}} $$
  3. (5)
    $$ \varDelta \boldsymbol{Import}{\boldsymbol{s}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{c},\boldsymbol{s}}=\frac{\boldsymbol{Import}{\boldsymbol{s}}_{\boldsymbol{r}\boldsymbol{1},\boldsymbol{c},\boldsymbol{s}}}{\boldsymbol{Import}{\boldsymbol{s}}_{\boldsymbol{r}\boldsymbol{1},\boldsymbol{c},\boldsymbol{s}\mathbf{0}}} $$

The final impact of climate change on total crop calorie availability for food consumption is the combination of the impact on domestic production and on imports:

  1. (6)
    $$ {\alpha}_{r1,c,s}=\frac{ Pro{d}_{r1,c,s}-{\displaystyle {\sum}_{r2} Trad{e}_{r1,r2,c,s}}}{ Cons{o}_{r1,c,s}} $$
  2. (7)
    $$ FoodA{v}_{r,s}={\displaystyle {\sum}_c Cons{o}_{r,c,s}\cdot Ca{l}_c\cdot \left({\alpha}_{r,c,s}\cdot \varDelta Pro{d}_{r,c,s}+\left(1-{\alpha}_{r1,c,s}\right)\cdot \varDelta Import{s}_{r.c.s}\ \right)} $$
  3. (8)
    $$ \varDelta \boldsymbol{FoodA}{\boldsymbol{v}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{s}}=\frac{\boldsymbol{FoodA}{\boldsymbol{v}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{s}}}{\boldsymbol{FoodA}{\boldsymbol{v}}_{\boldsymbol{r},\boldsymbol{s}\mathbf{0}}} $$

Appendix 3: Results

Table 2 Biophysical impact of climate change on crop calorie production, imports and food availability by 2050
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Table 3 Evolution of food price index in the world and in the four Eastern Asian countries in 2050 (Base 2000−1) and percent change in price index with climate change compared to the historical climate
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Mosnier, A., Obersteiner, M., Havlík, P. et al. Global food markets, trade and the cost of climate change adaptation. Food Sec. 6, 29–44 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-013-0319-z

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