title: Enhanced economic connectivity to foster heat stress-related losses.
abstract: Assessing global impacts of unexpected meteorological events in an increasingly connected world economy is important for estimating the costs of climate change. We show that since the beginning of the 21st century, the structural evolution of the global supply network has been such as to foster an increase of climate-related production losses. We compute first- and higher-order losses from heat stress-induced reductions in productivity under changing economic and climatic conditions between 1991 and 2011. Since 2001, the economic connectivity has augmented in such a way as to facilitate the cascading of production loss. The influence of this structural change has dominated over the effect of the comparably weak climate warming during this decade. Thus, particularly under future warming, the intensification of international trade has the potential to amplify climate losses if no adaptation measures are taken.
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.; Institute of Physics, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany.; Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, 10829 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Leonie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wenz
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.; Institute of Physics, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany.; Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Anders
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-4432-4704
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Levermann
mesh_terms: D057231:Climate Change; D004467:Economics; D004526:Efficiency; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013312:Stress, Physiological
keywords: Climate change; climate adaptation; climatic extremes; costs of climate change; econometrics; economics of climate change; heat stress; multi-regional input-output matrices