Risk Assessment On Main Agro-meteorological Disasters During 1978-2008 In 10 Provinces Of China

As the main environmental issue,climate change with the main feature of global warming threatens various aspects of ecosystem and environment,and agriculture is one of the most sensitive and vulnerable sectors impacted by climate change.However,the severe impacts of agro-meteorological disasters on agricultural production could not be ignored for climate change adaption.Consequently,it is necessary to quantify and assess the risk of agro-meteorological disasters for policy-making of disaster mitigation in China.A methodology was developed to evaluate the agro-meteorological disaster risk based on the information diffusion theory,multivariate regression techniques,etc.10 provinces in China were chosen to assess the dynamics and impact of agro-meteorological disasters in 1978-2008 by the application of agricultural statistical data on statistical methods,and the spatial risk distribution of agricultural disasters were also analyzed.The main results are as follows:(1)Drought disaster with the highest disaster areas was the most important disaster among the four disasters including drought,flood,hail and frost;however,a high temporal variation was observed in the frost disaster with the coefficient variation(CV)of 159%.Compared to the period of 1979-1988,the proportion of the drought disaster area increased in 7 provinces in the period of 1989-2008;the proportion of the disaster areas increased in 7 provinces and 6 provinces for flood and frost disasters,respectively.The CVs of the disaster areas in the period of 1999-2008 increased in 7 provinces for drought,4 provinces for flood and 6 provinces for frost compared to the period of 1989-1998.(2)There were significant differences in the risk of agro-meteorological disasters among 10 provinces.The risks of drought and flood were higher than that of frost and hail.In terms of regional distribution,drought disaster risk in the eastern province was higher than that in the western provinces,the northern provinces higher than the southern.High flood disaster risk mainly occurred in the Yangtze River region and thenortheastern region in China,and Qinghai province in Tibetan Plateau had a high risk in hail disaster with the 18.1%probability of the disaster area proportion more than 10%happening.(3)The severe meteorological yield decline occurred in the 10 provinces.The uncertainty and variation of meteorological yield in Inner Mongolia(36.77%and 2.71,respectively)and Heilongjiang province(36.74%and 2.52%,respectively)were relative higher than other provinces.Yunnan province had the highest variation in meteorological yield decline among all the provinces.Qinghai province,Anhui Province and Fujian Province were the sensitive regions under the negative impacts of climate change.(4)The interannual change of the meteorological yields could be explained by the change of four disasters' areas.Drought was one of the main factors lead to the meteorological yield reduction.The major disasters induced meteorological yield reductionwerehail and frostin Qinghai and Xinjiang.