Climate Change Is Disrupting the Global Supply Chain Too
This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Covid pandemic has rightly received most of the blame for global supply chain upheavals in the past two years. But the less publicized impact of climate change on supply chains poses a far more serious threat and is already being felt, scholars and experts say.
The pandemic is “a temporary problem,” while climate change is “long-term dire,” said Austin Becker, a maritime infrastructure resilience scholar at the University of Rhode Island. “Climate change is a slow-moving crisis that is going to last a very, very long time, and it’s going to require some fundamental changes,” said Becker. “Every coastal community, every coastal transportation network is going to face some risks from this, and we’re not going to have nearly enough resources to make all the investments that are required.”
Of all of climate change’s threats to supply chains, sea level rise lurks as potentially the biggest. But even now, years before sea level rise begins inundating ports and other coastal infrastructure, supply chain disruptions caused by hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other forms of increasingly extreme weather are jolting the global economy. A sampling of these disruptions from just last year suggests the variety and magnitude of climate change’s threats:
The Texas freeze last February caused the worst involuntary energy blackout in US history. That forced three major semiconductor plants to close, exacerbating a global pandemic-triggered semiconductor shortage and further slowing production of microchip-dependent cars. The outages also forced railroad closures, severing heavily used supply chain links between Texas and the Pacific Northwest for three days.
Heavy rainfall and snowmelt last February caused some banks of the Rhine River, Europe’s most important commercial waterway, to begin to burst, triggering a halt in river shipping for several days. Then, in April, water levels on the Rhine, which was facing a long-term drought, dropped so low that cargo ships were forced to load no more than half their usual capacity to avoid running aground. In recent years, manufacturers relying on the Rhine “have increasingly faced shipping capacity reductions that disrupted both inbound raw material and outbound product delivery flows” as a result of drought, according to a May 2021 report by Everstream Analytics, which tracks supply chain trends.
Flooding in central China in late July disrupted supply chains for commodities such as coal, pigs, and peanuts and forced the closure of a Nissan automobile plant. SAIC Motor, the country’s largest automaker, announced that these disruptions caused what Reuters called a “short-term impact on logistics” at its giant plant in Zhengzhou, capable of producing 600,000 cars a year.
Hurricane Ida, the fifth-costliest hurricane in US history, struck the Gulf of Mexico coast in late August, damaging vital industrial installations that generate an array of products, including plastics and pharmaceuticals, and forcing a diversion of trucks, already in short supply across the country, for use in relief aid.
Fires in British Columbia from late June through early October triggered by an unprecedented heat wave comprised the third-worst wildfire season in the province’s history and closed a transportation choke point at Fraser Canyon that idled thousands of rail cars and stranded their contents. Then, in November, an atmospheric river, delivering what officials called “once-in-a-century” rainfall, caused severe flooding in the province. The floods severed crucial railroad and highway links to Canada’s largest port and forced a regional oil pipeline to close. The loss of the rail network forced provincial lumber companies to scale back production, causing price increases and shortages of lumber, paper pulp, and other wood products in the United States.
In December, a typhoon caused what TechWireAsia called “arguably the worst flooding in history in various parts” of Malaysia, and severely damaged Klang, Southeast Asia’s second-largest port. That created a break in the semiconductor supply chain, since semiconductors from Taiwan, by far the world’s largest manufacturer of advanced microchips, are routinely shipped to Klang for packaging at Malaysian factories before being transported to US companies and consumers. The packaging breakdown contributed to global semiconductor shortages and caused some US automobile manufacturers to suspend operations.