CAS-Climate: GOALI: Quantifying the Risk of Temporal and Spatial Compounding Extreme Climate Events on Global Breadbasket Regions

Climate extremes in global breadbasket regions trigger ripple effects on global food security and American multinational food industries. While individual extreme events like droughts and heatwaves negatively affect crop yields, the most severe effects result from compound extreme events, posing significant challenges for climate adaptation. Quantifying these extreme climate shocks is of great interest to industries, insurance companies, and governments.

This study aims to investigate the interconnected climate extremes of droughts and heatwaves, which can co-evolve over time (temporal compounding) or occur simultaneously in different breadbasket regions (spatial compounding). Although the risks of individual extremes have been studied, an integrated risk assessment of temporal and spatial compounding extremes on global breadbaskets and supply regions is lacking.

Spatial compounding events can lead to significant economic impacts on American industries and strain interconnected supply chains. This GOALI project involves a university-industry partnership to investigate the risks of temporal and spatial compounding climate extremes on global breadbasket regions and PepsiCo's supply chain source regions.

The project objective are to: (a) quantify the potential risk of drought, heatwaves, and compound drought and heatwave events on crop yields for breadbasket regions, (b) quantify the spatial compounding risk of extreme events simultaneously occurring over multiple (coupled) breadbasket regions, (c) investigate the potential impact of climate change on the evolution and spatial synchronization of drought, heatwave, and compound events for the breadbasket regions, and (d) develop seasonal prediction models for spatially compounding extreme events and associated risk on crop yields over the supply regions for PepsiCo. The research results will have a positive societal impact by reducing the risk of extreme events on global food security and enhancing the competitiveness of American multinational food industries globally.

The collaborative framework will drive innovations and foster new talent, such as graduate students and postdocs, by creating a skilled workforce capable of addressing real-world challenges. Agriculture-related stakeholders, including business units, industries, and farmers who outsource agricultural products, can use the created tools to mitigate the risks of climate extremes, enhance environmental sustainability, promote social equity and economic stability for farmers, and strengthen global cooperation between American industries and international partners.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.