Despite the growing accessibility of international grain and oilseed markets, high production costs and trade frictions are still prevalent, contributing to regional heterogeneities in the landed cost of grain imports. Here we quantify the landed cost for six grain commodities across 3,500 administrative regions, capturing regional cost differences to produce grain and transport it across international borders. We find large heterogeneities in the costs of imported grain, which are highest in Oceania, Central America and landlocked Africa. While some regions have uniform landed costs across sourcing locations, others face cost variations across trading partners, showing large inequalities in access. We find that most regions could benefit from a targeted approach to reduce landed cost while others benefit from a mixed strategies approach. Our results highlight that spatial information on production, trade and transport is essential to inform policies aiming to build an efficient and resilient global agricultural commodity trade system.

Are our efforts to protect society from the adverse impacts of nature doing more harm than good? This is the main question that Stephen Robert Miller poses in his inaugural book Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature.

Climate hazards pose increasing threats to development outcomes across the world’s coastal regions by impacting infrastructure service delivery. Using a high-resolution dataset of 8.2 million households in Bangladesh’s coastal zone, we assess the extent to which infrastructure service disruptions induced by flood, cyclone and erosion hazards can thwart progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Results show that climate hazards potentially threaten infrastructure service access to all households, with the poorest being disproportionately threatened in 69% of coastal subdistricts. Targeting adaptation to these climatic threats in one-third (33%) of the most vulnerable areas could help to safeguard 50–85% of achieved progress towards SDG 3, 4, 7, 8 and 13 indicators. These findings illustrate the potential of geospatial climate risk analyses, which incorporate direct household exposure and essential service access. Such high-resolution analyses are becoming feasible even in data-scarce parts of the world, helping decision-makers target and prioritize pro-poor development.

Climate-related disruptions to water supply infrastructure services incur direct financial losses to utilities (e.g. to repair damaged assets) and externalise a societal cost to domestic customers due to additional costs that they may incur (e.g. to acquire water from alternative sources). The latter often represents an uncompensated social burden, which should be properly accounted for in investment planning. Here we present a new framework for quantifying direct financial risks burdened by utilities and alternative water purchase losses incurred by domestic customers, including those in low-income groups, during flood- and drought-induced utility water supply disruptions. This framework enables the comparison of benefit-cost ratios of a portfolio of flood protection and leakage reduction for water supply systems across the island of Jamaica. A system-level optioneering analysis allows the identification of the optimal adaptation option per system. We estimate that 34% of systems would benefit from flood defences and 53% would benefit from leakage reduction to adaptation to droughts. The benefit that could be achieved by implementing all system optimised adaptation options is estimated to be 720 million Jamaican dollars per year on average, representing a substantial saving for the utility and its customers, including low-income customers. We identify options that offer strong synergies between economic and equity objectives for both types of adaptation option. The proposed framework is established to support the business case for climate adaptation in the water supply sector and to prioritise across flood and drought mitigation options. We take a first step towards mainstreaming equity considerations in water supply sector optioneering frameworks by estimating the contribution of adaptation options towards reducing household costs for low-income customers.

Many drinking water utilities face immense challenges in supplying sustainable, drought-resilient services to households. Here we propose a quantified framework to perform drought risk analysis on ~5600 potable water supply utilities and evaluate the benefit of adaptation actions. We identify global hotspots of present-day and mid-century drought risk under future scenarios of climate change and demand growth (namely, SSP1-2.6, SSP3-7.0, SSP5-8.5). We estimate the mean rate of unsustainable or disrupted utility supply at 15% (interquartile range, 0–26%) and project a global increase in risk of between 30–45% under future scenarios. Implementing the most cost-effective adaptation action identified per utility would mitigate additional future risk by 75–80%. However, implementing the subset of cost-effective options that generate sufficient tariff revenue to provide a benefit-cost ratio that is greater than 1 would only achieve 5–20% of this benefit. The results underline the challenge of attracting the financing required to close the climate adaptation gap for water supply utilities.

Freight transport systems (FTS) are critical for the well-functioning of freight flows within countries and across borders. Climate extremes can disrupt freight flows, resulting in economic losses due to costly rerouting, spikes in freight rates or freight disruptions. However, climate extremes, and climate change more generally, are often not adequately included in long-term transport planning, nor are freight logistics generally set up to cope with such disruptions. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the main challenges of FTS and logistics within the context of climate change. Moreover, we summarize approaches and provide actionable guidance on how to improve the resilience of freight movements on three interconnected levels. First, we discuss ways how climate change can be included within the asset life cycle of transport infrastructure. Second, we set out approaches to perform climate criticality analysis of a national or international freight transport network. Third, we discuss logistics and governance considerations that can help boost climate resilience of freight movements on a systemic level. This chapter provides actionable recommendations to mainstream climate resilience in freight transport planning and operations.

There is growing recognition of the need for long-duration energy storage to cope with low frequency (i.e. seasonal to multi-annual) variability in renewable energy supplies. Recent analysis for the UK has estimated that 60–100 TWh of hydrogen storage could be required to provide zero-carbon backup for renewable energy supplies in 2050. However, the analysis did not consider the potential role of green energy imports as a supplement to domestic energy storage. Using a global spatially-explicit model of green hydrogen/ammonia production and shipping we estimate the lowest import costs for green ammonia to the UK, and compare them with the levelized costs of energy storage across scenarios of varying domestic renewable energy production. The results indicate that imported green ammonia could offer a cost-comparable alternative to domestic hydrogen production, storage and power generation, whilst increasing energy system resilience through supply diversification, at a similar or cheaper delivered energy cost compared to a hydrogen-only storage system. In countries lacking the geological potential for low-cost hydrogen storage, green ammonia imports could have an even more significant role.

Green ammonia has been proposed as a technologically viable solution to decarbonise global shipping, yet there are conflicting ambitions for where global production, transport and fuelling infrastructure will be located. Here, we develop a spatial modelling framework to quantify the cost-optimal fuel supply to decarbonise shipping in 2050 using green ammonia. We find that the demand for green ammonia by 2050 could be three to four times the current (grey) ammonia production, requiring major new investments in infrastructure. Our model predicts a regionalisation of supply, entailing a few large supply clusters that will serve regional demand centres, with limited long-distance shipping of green ammonia fuel. In this cost-efficient model, practically all green ammonia production is predicted to lie within 40° latitudes North/South. To facilitate this transformation, investments worth USD 2 trillion would be needed, half of which will be required in low- and middle-income countries.

Recent phenomena such as pandemics, geopolitical tensions, and climate change-induced extreme weather events have caused transportation network interruptions, revealing vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. A salient example is the March 2021 Suez Canal blockage, which delayed 432 vessels carrying cargo valued at $92.7 billion, triggering widespread supply chain disruptions. Our ability to model the spatiotemporal ramifications of such incidents remains limited. To fill this gap, we develop an agent-based complex network model integrated with frequently updated maritime data. The Suez Canal blockage is taken as a case study. The results indicate that the effects of such blockages go beyond the directly affected countries and sectors. The Suez Canal blockage led to global losses of about $136.9 ($127.5–$147.3) billion, with India suffering 75% of these losses. Global losses show a nonlinear relationship with the duration of blockage and exhibit intricate trends post blockage. Our proposed model can be applied to diverse blockage scenarios, potentially acting as an early-alert system for the ensuing supply chain impacts. Furthermore, high-resolution daily data post blockage offer valuable insights that can help nations and industries enhance their resilience against similar future events.

Infrastructure systems are particularly vulnerable to climate hazards, such as flooding, wildfires, cyclones and temperature fluctuations. Responding to these threats in a proportionate and targeted way requires quantitative analysis of climate risks, which underpins infrastructure resilience and adaptation strategies. The aim of this paper is to review the recent developments in quantitative climate risk analysis for key infrastructure sectors, including water and wastewater, telecommunications, health and education, transport (seaports, airports, road, rail and inland waterways), and energy (generation, transmission and distribution). We identify several overarching research gaps, which include the (i) limited consideration of multi-hazard and multi-infrastructure interactions within a single modelling framework, (ii) scarcity of studies focusing on certain combinations of climate hazards and infrastructure types, (iii) difficulties in scaling-up climate risk analysis across geographies, (iv) increasing challenge of validating models, (v) untapped potential of further knowledge spillovers across sectors, (vi) need to embed equity considerations into modelling frameworks, and (vii) quantifying a wider set of impact metrics. We argue that a cross-sectoral systems approach enables knowledge sharing and a better integration of infrastructure interdependencies between multiple sectors.

Disruptions to ports from climate extremes can have systemic impacts on global shipping, trade and supply chains. By combining estimated climatic-related port downtime at 1,320 ports with a global model of transport flows, we pinpoint systemic risks to global maritime transport, trade and supply-chain networks. We estimate a total of US$81 billion of global trade and at least US$122 billion of economic activity being at-risk on average annually.