Climate change increases North Korea’s hunger: implications for social resilience

Abstract

Adaption based on social resilience is proposed as effective measures to mitigate hunger and avoid disaster caused by climate change. But these have not been investigated comprehensively in climate-sensitive regions especially necessary-quantitative paths. North Korea (NK, undeveloped) and its neighbors (SK, South Korea, developed; China, developing) represent three economic levels that provide us with examples of how to examine climatic risk and quantify the contribution of social resilience to rice production. Our data-driven estimates show that climatic factors determined rice biomass changes in NK, while non-climatic factors dominated biomass changes in NK’s neighbors. If no action is taken, NK will face a higher climatic risk (with continuous high temperature heatwaves and precipitation extremes) by the 2080s with high emission scenario when rice biomass and production are expected to decrease by 20.2% and 14.4%, respectively, thereby potentially increasing hunger in NK. The contribution of social resilience to food production in the undeveloped region (15.2%) was far below the contribution observed in the developed and developing regions (83.0% and 86.1%, respectively). These findings highlight the importance of social resilience to mitigate the negative effects of climate change on food security and human hunger, and provide necessary-quantitative information.