Abstract
Under the background of global warming, China has experienced frequent natural disasters that have seriously affected grain production in recent decades. Based on historical documents from 1978–2014, we explored the spatio-temporal variation of five major kinds of natural disasters and grain losses in China using statistical techniques: the Mann-Kendall (MK) test, social network analysis (SNA), and geographic information system (GIS) tools. The disaster intensity index (Q) clearly showed the variation of natural disasters; all of China experienced a significant increasing trend at an annual scale, reaching its peak (27.77%) in 2000. The step change points in floods, droughts, hail, and low-temperature events began to occur in 1983, 1988, 1988, 1992, respectively, while no obvious trend was detected for typhoon activity from 2001 to 2014. Drought and flood were the most serious types of disaster over the last four decades, accounting for more than 50% of total grain losses. Eight major provinces were identified with severe grain losses: Heilongjiang, Shandong, Henan, Hebei, Anhui, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Hunan, and Hubei. Five studied natural disaster types were identified throughout the seven physical geographical regions. Spatial distribution for the different disaster types showed significant geographical distribution characteristics. Natural disasters gradually became more diverse from north to south. Droughts, hail, and low-temperature disasters were randomly distributed throughout China; flood and typhoon disasters exhibited significant spatial auto-correlation and clustering patterns. Finally, in accordance with the intensity of natural disaster, the annual grain losses at the provincial scale initially increased (ranging from 0.14 million to 3.26 million tonnes in 1978–2000), and then decreased after 2000 (ranging from 3.26 million to 1.58 million tonnes in 2000–2014). The center of gravity of grain losses gradually moved northward. These results emphasize that developing different strategies for disaster prevention and mitigation programs in the major grain producing areas (e.g., Heilongjiang, Shandong, and Henan) are critical and important to China’s food security.
Highlights
Natural disasters and food security are increasingly receiving attention from scientists, public, and countries around the world
The results indicate the following: (1) the area covered by natural disasters exhibited a declining trend in 1978–1984 and 1992–2014 (Figure 2a)
(2) The area affected by natural disasters decreased from 1978 to 1984, but it exhibited an increasing trend from 1985 to 2000, and the average areas affected by natural disasters was the largest (1.11 × 106 ha) in 2000
Summary
Natural disasters and food security are increasingly receiving attention from scientists, public, and countries around the world. Lesk et al (2016) [1] stated that several extreme weather disasters have partially or completely damaged regional crop production. The effects of these disasters have seriously restricted the sustainable development of economies and societies and may have threatened human existence. Economic activities are frequently affected by natural disasters, and increasingly more studies have focused on the impact of natural disasters on regional economies (Belasen et al, 2014; Mu et al, 2016) [7,8]. Regional increases in climate extremes have adverse effects on food production, freshwater availability, and quality, and the risks of infectious diseases (Kim et al, 2013; Mottaleb et al, 2013) [14,15]. Agricultural production under current technological conditions is closely linked to natural disasters (Ray et al, 2015; Keating et al, 1998; Lansigan et al, 2000) [18,19,20]
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