The global economy is facing a serious recession due to COVID-19, with implications for CO 2 emissions. Here, using a global adaptive multiregional input-output model and scenarios of lockdown and fiscal counter measures, we show that global emissions from economic sectors will decrease by 3.9 to 5.6% in 5 years (2020 to 2024) compared with a no-pandemic baseline scenario (business as usual for economic growth and carbon intensity decline). Global economic interdependency via supply chains means that blocking one country's economic activities causes the emissions of other countries to decrease even without lockdown policies. Supply-chain effects contributed 90.1% of emissions decline from power production in 2020 but only 13.6% of transport sector reductions. Simulations of follow-up fiscal stimuli in 41 major countries increase global 5-yr emissions by −6.6 to 23.2 Gt (−4.7 to 16.4%), depending on the strength and structure of incentives. Therefore, smart policy is needed to turn pandemic-related emission declines into firm climate action.

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Abstract. Increasing water scarcity places considerable importance on the quantification of water footprint (WF) at different levels. Despite progress made previously, there are still very few WF studies focusing on specific river basins, especially for those in arid and semi-arid regions. The aim of this study is to quantify WF within the Heihe River Basin (HRB), a basin located in the arid and semi-arid northwest of China. The findings show that the WF was 1768 million m 3 yr −1 in the HRB over [2004][2005][2006]. Agricultural production was the largest water consumer, accounting for 96 % of the WF (92 % for crop production and 4 % for livestock production). The remaining 4 % was for the industrial and domestic sectors. The "blue" (surface-and groundwater) component of WF was 811 million m 3 yr −1 . This indicates a blue water proportion of 46 %, which is much higher than the world average and China's average, which is mainly due to the aridness of the HRB and a high dependence on irrigation for crop production. However, even in such a river basin, blue WF was still smaller than "green" (soil water) WF, indicating the importance of green water. We find that blue WF exceeded blue water availability during eight months per year and also on an annual basis. This indicates that WF of human activities was achieved at a cost of violating environmental flows of natural freshwater ecosystems, and such a WF pattern is not sustainable. Considering the large WF of crop production, optimizing the crop planting pattern is often a key to achieving more sustainable water use in arid and semi-arid regions.

International headlines over the last few years have been dominated by extreme weather events, and floods have been amongst the most frequent and devastating. These disasters represent high costs and functional disruptions to societies and economies. The consequent breakdown of the economic equilibrium exacerbates the losses of the initial physical damages and generates indirect costs that largely amplify the burden of the total damage. Neglecting indirect damages results in misleading results regarding the real dimensions of the costs and prevents accurate decision-making in flood risk management. To obtain an accurate assessment of total flooding costs, this paper introduces the flood footprint concept, as a novel accounting framework that measures the total economic impact that is directly and indirectly caused to the productive system, triggered by the flooding damages to the productive factors, infrastructure and residential capital. The assessment framework account for the damages in the flooded region as well as in wider economic systems and social networks. The flood footprint builds on previous research on disaster impact analysis based on Input-Output methodology, which considers inter-industry flows of goods and services for economic output. The framework was applied to the 2007 summer floods in the UK to determine the total economic impact in the region of Yorkshire and The Humber. The results suggest that the total economic burden of the floods was approximately 4% of the region's GVA (£2.7 billion), from which over half comes from knock-on effects during the 14 months that the economy of Yorkshire and The Humber last to recover. This paper is the first to apply the conceptual framework of flood footprint to a real past event, by which it highlights the economic interdependence among industrial sectors. Through such interrelationships, the economic impacts of a flooding event spill over into the entire economic system, and some of the most affected sectors can be those that are not directly damaged. Neglecting the impact of indirect damages would underestimate the total social costs of flooding events, and mislead the correspondent actions for risk management and adaptation

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