Reducing livestock snow disaster risk in the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau due to warming and socioeconomic development

Abstract 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.