National vulnerability to extreme climatic events: the cases of electricity disruption in China and Japan

Extreme climatic events are likely to adversely affect many countries throughout the world, but the degrees among countries may be different. China and Japan are the countries with high incidences of extreme weather/disaster, both facing with the urgent task of addressing climate change. This study seeks to quantitatively compare the impacts of extreme climatic events on socio-economic systems (defined as vulnerability) of the two countries by simulating the consequences of hypothetical the same degree of electricity disruption along with extreme events. To do that, two CGE (computable general equilibrium) models are constructed, by using which three stage scenarios are simulated for China and Japan respectively. The results reveal that China and Japan have unequal socio-economic vulnerabilities to extreme events. (1) Negative impact of the same degree of power outages is bigger on China's socio economic system than on that of Japan. And this difference is more obvious in the very short-run scenario. (2) The decline of China¡¯s GDP, total output and employment levels is 2-3 times higher than that of Japan, while the difference of the resident welfare levels is sharper, which of China drops 3 to 5 times of Japan. (3) Structural factors is the main reason of vulnerability differences between China and Japan, including the differences of expenditure structure, factor input structure for production of life requirement sectors, material and energy dependence for production of industrial sectors, and usage structure of services outputs. Based on these findings, some policy implications and recommendations for fairness issues on climate change adaptation are proposed.