Identifying agricultural disaster risk zones for future climate actions

RESEARCH ARTICLE Identifying agricultural disaster risk zones for future climate actions Nkongho Ayuketang ArreyndipID* Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Buea, Buea, Cameroon * ayuketang@aims-cameroon.org Abstract Identifying agricultural disaster risk regions before the occurrence of climate-related disas- ters is critical for early mitigation planning. This paper aims to identify these regions based on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the bilat- eral and multilateral trade network data of the World Integrated Trade Solution(WITS) and the agent-based economic model Acclimate. By applying a uniform forcing across agricul- tural sectors of some breadbasket regions (US, EU and China), when single and simulta- neous extreme weather events occur, such as the 2018 European heatwave, production and consumption value losses and gains are calculated at regional and global levels. Com- paring the FAO data sets, WITS, and Acclimate’s production value losses, the results show a strong dependence of agricultural production losses on a region’s output and connectivity level in the global supply and trade network. While India, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Australia, and Iran are highly vulnerable, the imposition of export restrictions to compensate for demand shortfalls makes Sub-Saharan Africa the most vulnerable region, as it is heavily dependent on agricultural imports. In addition, simultaneous extreme weather events can exacerbate the loss of value of agricultural production relative to single extreme weather

events. Agricultural practices to increase production such as smart farming, increased investment in plantation agriculture, and diversification of trading partners can help mitigate future food security risks in Sub-Saharan Africa and other agricultural import-dependent regions. 1 Introduction The continuous injection of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses into the earth’s atmosphere has significantly contributed to increasing global mean temperature [1–9]. This has led to the intensification and recurrent of other meteorological phenomena such as hurricanes, typhoons, extreme rainfall and floods, heatwaves. Increasing sea level rise has equally been associated with anthropogenic contribution [10–12]. Which has resulted in economic and infrastructural repercussions, with coastal cities being the hardest hit. Researchers have recently found that two or more of these extreme weather events now occur near-simulta- neously in space and time. These concurrent events are becoming more frequent and growing in magnitude under increasing global mean temperature [2, 13–18]. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260430 December 2, 2021 1 / 16 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Arreyndip NA (2021) Identifying agricultural disaster risk zones for future climate actions. PLoS ONE 16(12): e0260430. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260430 Editor: Ghaffar Ali, Shenzhen University, CHINA Received: May 11, 2021 Accepted: November 9, 2021 Published: December 2, 2021 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the

benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260430 Copyright: © 2021 Nkongho Ayuketang Arreyndip. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), freely available online at https://www.fao. org/faostat/en/#data/QCL. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.