Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & POLICY
Volume 12, Issue 4, Pages 438-452Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2008.11.005
Keywords
Climate change impacts; Adaptability; Resilience; Food security; Crop model
Categories
Funding
- Natural Environment Research Council (UK) through the Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System: Global Scale impacts Project
- Rural Economy
- Land Use Programme
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
- Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/G021694/1, ES/E017479/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/E001858/1, NE/E001858/2, NE/E001904/1, NE/E001815/1, NE/E00184X/1, NE/E001874/1, NE/E001831/1, NE/E001882/1, NE/E001866/1, NE/E001890/1, NE/E001823/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- ESRC [ES/E017479/1, ES/G021694/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- NERC [NE/E001882/1, NE/E001858/1, NE/E001858/2, NE/E001904/1, NE/E001831/1, NE/E001815/1, NE/E001823/1, NE/E001890/1, NE/E00184X/1, NE/E001866/1, NE/E001874/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Why is it that sometimes small droughts trigger serious crop losses while in other cases even large droughts do not have such a major effect? In this paper, we identify socio-economic indicators associated with sensitivity and resilience to drought for each of China's main grain crops (rice, wheat and corn). Provincial harvest and rainfall data (1961-2001) are used to calculate an annual crop-drought vulnerability index. We separate sensitive cases (where significant harvest losses occurred in years with only minor droughts) and resilient cases (where harvest losses were minimal despite there being a major drought) and explore the socio-economic characteristics of these different situations. Results show that sensitive cases were particularly common in economically poor landlocked provinces and in wealthy coastal areas that have a limited land base. in such sensitive cases, the size of the rural population and the quantity of agricultural inputs were negatively correlated with drought vulnerability, while for resilient cases, vulnerability was negatively correlated with the abundance of land. This leads us to propose a series of drought-vulnerability typologies based on the extent to which land, labour, capital, agricultural technology, and infrastructure buffer or exacerbate the effect of a drought event. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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