Global warming can have positive or negative impacts on society depending on sectors and changes in climate impact drivers, resulting in opportunities or risks. The same holds true for social-economic changes. However, past research has mostly focused on assessing risks, leaving potential opportunities under-addressed. Here, we simulated the impact of climate change and socioeconomic development on livestock snow disasters over the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau during 1986-2100, by integrating the drivers of climate and socioeconomic changes via an event-based disaster risk assessment model. Model results show climate change and socioeconomic development contributes about equally to reducing livestock loss in snow disasters by 4% yr-1 up to 2100 under representative concentration pathway 8.5 and shared-socioeconomic pathway 5. The marginal benefit from climate change was projected to be a 43.2% reduction in annual average loss per degree kelvin warming, and that from socioeconomic development was a 12.4% reduction per 100% increase in gross domestic production. In a 2 °C warmer world, the annual average loss could be 91% smaller compared with the baseline period (1986-2005). Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C would reduce the benefit by 5%, requiring a 135% increase in the marginal benefits of prevention capacity to offset the reduction.
Keywords: Climate change; Livestock snow disaster; Relative contribution; Socioeconomic development; The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.
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