Research

Vegetables are vital for urban nutrition security, yet their wholesale price stability in response to temperature extremes is poorly understood. Analyzing a decade of daily data from 265 Chinese wholesale markets, we find that extreme heat and cold significantly disrupt urban vegetable distribution, raising price volatility. We project that without adaptive interventions, future climate scenarios could amplify annual wholesale price fluctuations by 57 to 188 billion CNY by the end of the century. However, our analysis identifies powerful buffers. Cities with robust self-sufficiency, efficient transport, and vegetables with longer shelf-lives exhibit markedly stronger resilience. Most importantly, we show that strategic urban adaptations, such as investing in cold chains and shortening supply chains, could mitigate 57% to 90% of this additional financial risk. These findings highlight that targeted investments in urban supply chains are a critical, and effective, strategy for safeguarding food security in a warming world, with direct relevance for cities across the Global South. 

Rainfall affects productivity in many ways. Compared to temperature anomalies, the impacts of precipitation anomalies have been understudied, with existing evidence at the macro level. By combining ground station-level climate data and micro-data from half a million manufacturing firms in China, we uncover that rainfall negatively impacts firms’ productivity, with the most significant negative impacts concentrated in extremely heavy rainfall anomalies. Labor-intensive, low-tech, or less productive firms and those located in rainy regions are vulnerable to rainfall extremes. Our estimates are large enough to explain previously observed output losses in cross-country panels. We uncover four primary channels through which manufacturing firms experience productivity loss: agriculture intermediate inputs, labor inputs, transportation disruption and input reallocation. Additionally, we identify firm level increase in non-productive costs and firm entry/exit as effective mitigation strategies, and country-level infrastructure construction including anti-flood dam and improved road infrastructure and drainage systems. Utilizing the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Scenarios (SSPs), we estimate the future impact of rainfall on productivity in a cost-benefit analysis. Our projections indicate a substantial output loss of 2.4-14.9 billion CNY by 2100, due to the increase in extreme rainfall events under each scenario with different implementation of environmental policies. These findings are significant in explaining the macro-level effects of rainfall.