Identifying agricultural disaster risk zones for future climate actions

4 Discussion The agricultural sector is no doubt the most vulnerable economic sector to climate change. This is because of the direct impacts of meteorological extremes such as droughts, heatwaves, floods, extreme precipitation, and strong winds (hurricanes and tornadoes) on agricultural productivity and their disruptions to the food supply chain. While droughts exert the most impacts, heatwaves which are equally associated with increase mean temperature, have also been found to affect crop yield and productivity. Floods, extreme precipitation, hurricanes, bush fires, and insect pest will equally destroy cropland, leading to low output from farms. For regions where the economy largely depends on subsistence agriculture, the impact of climate change will be heavy, posing a threat to regional food security. Under increasing international trade linkages, climate-induced agricultural losses in one part of the world can significantly affect business in another through the propagation of shocks down trade networks. Research- ers have associated increase network losses with its increasing complexity [24]. This makes highly inter-connected regions very vulnerable to economic losses. The simulations carried out in this paper aims at identifying vulnerable agricultural regions to climate change for early action to mitigate impacts such as designing a more resilient agricultural sector. The findings show that highly interconnected breadbasket regions such as India, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and most of South America are vulnerable to net-

work losses with India, Brazil, and Russia showing the highest vulnerability. Very similar results have been obtained by Bren d’Amour et al [35] and Vogel et al [36] proving that indeed agricultural losses is the network and output quantity dependent. At the regional level, policies such as imposing export restrictions to compensate for demand deficits may secure regional food banks for major food-producing regions but will put the lives of millions of people in regions that import more than they produce locally. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of those regions with low agricultural output. Agricultural practices to increase production such as smart agri- culture, increase investment in plantation agriculture, and diversifying regional and interna- tional trade partners, may help mitigate future food security risks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the limitations of this work are that a uniform forcing is considered over the bread- basket regions where in reality, extreme weather-induced agricultural losses aren’t uniform, as many affected areas suffer different magnitudes of losses. Moreover, the FAO data used is for the year 2018 and the WITS network data is for the year 2016. We expect further research that uses the agricultural and network data of that year including data about the fraction of agricul- tural losses due to an extreme weather event in that year for a thorough impact assessment. 5 Conclusion Early disaster warnings usually call for prompt action to mitigate impacts. Identifying agricul-

tural disaster risk zones before climate-related disasters occur helps in designing effective disaster risk reduction strategies and policies for regional and global food security. In an increasingly inter-connected world through supply and trade networks, the economic impact of climate-related disasters can be felt in some regions far from their epicenters through the propagation of shocks down supply and trade networks. These regions are considered here to be at risk. Moreover, shocks coming from different trade routes might overlap thereby ampli- fying their overall economic impact over a region. The agent-based economic model Acclimate together with the EORA 2013 economic network, the FAO agricultural production data for the year 2018, and the bilateral and multilateral trade network data from the World Integrated Trade Solution(WITS) have been employed to assess and identify agricultural disaster risks zones. A uniform forcing has been applied over some breadbasket regions (USA, EU, and China) when single and concurrent extreme weather events occur such as the case of the 2018 PLOS ONE Identifying agricultural disaster risk zones for future climate actions PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260430 December 2, 2021 13 / 16