Rainfall-Related Weather Indices for Three Main Crops in China
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ARTICLE
Rainfall-Related Weather Indices for Three Main Crops in China Jing Zhang1 • Zhao Zhang1 • Fulu Tao2
Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Rainfall-related hazards—deficit rain and excessive rain—inevitably stress crop production, and weather index insurance is one possible financial tool to mitigate such agro-metrological losses. In this study, we investigated where two rainfall-related weather indices— anomaly-based index (AI) and humidity-based index (HI)—could be best used for three main crops (rice, wheat, and maize) in China’s main agricultural zones. A county is defined as an ‘‘insurable county’’ if the correlation between a weather index and yield loss was significant. Among maize-cropping counties, both weather indices identified more insurable counties for deficit rain than for excessive rain (AI: 172 vs 63; HI: 182 vs 68); moreover, AI identified lower basis risk for deficit rain in most agricultural zones while HI for excessive rain. For rice, the number of AIinsurable counties was higher than the number of HI-insurable counties for deficit rain (274 vs 164), but lower for excessive rain (199 vs 272); basis risks calculated by two weather indices showed obvious difference only in Zone I. Finally, more wheat-insurable counties (AI: 196 vs 71; HI: 73 vs 59) and smaller basis risk indicate that both weather indices performed better for excessive rain in wheatplanting counties. In addition, most insurable counties showed independent yield loss, but did not necessarily result in effective risk pooling. This study is a primary & Zhao Zhang [email protected] 1
Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Hazards of the Ministry of Education, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
2
Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
evaluation of rainfall-related weather indices for the three main crops in China, which will be significantly helpful to the agricultural insurance market and governments’ policy making. Keywords Agricultural insurance China Deficit rain Excessive rain Risk pooling Weather index
1 Introduction The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have increased in the past several decades, resulting in severe crop yield loss and farmer income reduction (Godfray et al. 2010; Lobell et al. 2011; Tao et al. 2013). Among such events, rainfall-related events—deficit rainfall and excessive rainfall—have showed harsh effects on crop production in China (Tao et al. 2003; Zhang, Chen et al. 2014; Zhang, Wang et al. 2014; Zhang et al. 2016). Drought, a typical agro-meteorological disaster caused by deficit rainfall, is the most frequent disaster for maize and wheat (frequency during 1991–2009: 48.6% and 79.2%) in China, followed by heavy rainfall (frequency during 1991–2009: 15.8% and 6.0%) (Zhang, Chen et al. 2014; Zhang, Wang et al. 2014). For rice, the area affected by drought has increased, since rainfall over land h
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