Climate change is known to affect some parts of the world more severely than others, such as developing countries being worse hit by droughts and famine. A new study, however, notes that the effects of weather events can reverberate all over the world.

Research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change in Germany suggested that globalization, which entails greater connectedness among nations, can lead to climate-related issues in one area to be felt throughout the globe.

“[P]roduction failure in poor countries can affect richer countries – and that is relevant information that needs to be investigated much more,” said study lead author and professor Anders Levermann.

In focusing on global supply chain, the team studied various intricate interconnections, such as nation A depending on nation B for a certain product supply, and Nation C supplying nation B with materials to create such product. They probed how specific climate-rooted supply chain disturbances might affect the entire network.

Rapid Globalization, Not Climate Itself

The researchers formed a model of an economic network worldwide, feeding it with data on global economic trade and daily temperatures from 1991 to 2011 in 186 countries. Analysis was focused on heat stress in mostly tropical regions, which are the hottest parts of Earth in the first place.

They analyzed first-order production losses, which are the direct impact of heat stress and its effects on a country’s laborers and higher-order losses, which comprise the cascading effects of numerous losses in the entire supply chain.

The discovery both first- and higher-order losses climbed during the period, but mostly from 2001 onwards.

This result appears to be at odds with temperature data, which drastically changed in the 1990s. While heat stress has resulted in first-order losses, the overall rise in global temperatures in the last decades did not appear to drive the increase in cascading trade effects observed.

Analyzing global network changes, on the other hand, led researchers to find greater global connectivity from 2001 to 2011, making them conclude that climate per se was not the largest influence in the increased climate-related production losses, but the recent intensification of globalization, making nations much more dependent on each other.

While climate disturbances give birth to the production losses, the single major factor in these losses’ cascading effect is globalization’s rise. Countries like India and China are more linked now to the rest of the world, cited Levermann.

Preventing Future Production Losses

In a business-as-usual climate situation until 2100, as the team simulated, the primary role of globalization will continue. In the 2011 economic network marked by the highest level of global connectivity, for instance, the study model suggested the highest level of production losses.

The researchers concluded that adaptation measures have to be established to prevent these types of production losses. Ideas include promoting greater storage – typically not favored because they mean cash just sitting around and not doing anything – in order to mitigate future losses.

Countries can also source the same product types from many different supplier countries in order to make up for disrupted supply.

The findings were detailed in the journal Sciences Advances.

Other feared effects of extreme weather conditions include drought and high temperatures triggering the accumulation of toxic components in crops. Food crops could be unleashing more chemical compounds proving hazardous to both humans and livestock, warned a United Nations report.

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