In this paper, the authors examine how increasing extreme climate events could create cascading risks across global crop trade networks, showing how shocks in major exporting regions may heighten exposure in already food-vulnerable regions through trade.
Seine et Marne, France: Fire in a wheat field due to drought at the beginning of summer.
Global warming is likely to increase the frequency of extreme climate events, triggering cascading effects in crop trade across country borders. When extreme events affect multiple trading partners simultaneously, the resulting exposure may aggregate through trade dependencies in ways that are not captured by single-location analyses.
To address this gap, the authors develop a new metric that quantifies countries’ exposure as a trade-weighted fractional change in projected future climate extremes in trade partner countries. Their results show that, in a mid-term period (2041–2060) exposure to hot events that occur abroad would increase nearly three times for 10% of countries via import of staple crops. Top sources of this imported exposure to remote extreme events are often major breadbaskets across hot, wet and dry events. Even in a near-term period (2021–2040), twice as much exposure may be exported from these countries.
Those findings show that extremes and trade can reinforce each other in a way that will substantially heighten exposure, and underscore the urgency of enhanced preparedness for interconnected climate risks.
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