Projections of future drought intensity associated with various local greenhouse gas emission scenarios in East Asia

Abstract

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are ongoing in many East Asian countries; however, their influences on future drought remain unknown. We analyzed future changes in drought intensity over East Asia using the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 and the new two limiting local greenhouse gas emission scenarios in East Asia: National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER)-H scenario for high emission and NIER-L scenario for low emission. The two scenarios were made by a fully coupled global climate model with prescribed gas boundaries of high and low greenhouse gas emissions from an atmospheric chemistry model reflecting the up-to-date environmental policies of South Korea, China, and Japan. The application of a clustering analysis to the calculated drought index time series identified four zonally distributed drought regions in the present-day period (1951-2016). Among these regions, higher latitude regions showed a more rapidly increasing trend in drought intensity than other regions for the present-day period. All future scenarios projected the continuation of this meridional intensification trend of drought until 2100; however, the intensification rates in the NIER-L were much smaller than those in the RCP8.5 and NIER-H scenarios. Our results suggest that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is critical for East Asian countries to alleviate the potential damages of future droughts.

Differences in multi‐model ensembles of CMIP5 and CMIP6 projections for future droughts in South Korea

“…Climate change effect on drought characteristics is already noticeable on the Korean peninsula (Oh et al, 2014). Park et al (2020) reported more severe droughts in East Asia, including South Korea, when estimating future emission scenarios.…”

Increasing Concurrent Drought Probability in Global Main Crop Production Countries

“…(2014) found that limiting climate change under the RCP2.6 scenario could reduce 80% of the global yield losses that expected under the RCP8.5 scenario; Park et al. (2020) investigated the mitigation effects on drought in East Asia; Cao et al. (2011) found that reduction in CO 2 concentration can decrease precipitation deficit.…”