LAUSR

Significance We project drought losses in China under global warming of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C. To assess future drought losses, we project the regional gross domestic product under shared socioeconomic pathways instead of using a static socioeconomic scenario. We identify increasing precipitation and evapotranspiration patterns. With increasing drought intensity and areal coverage across China, drought losses will increase considerably. The estimated losses in a sustainable development pathway at 1.5 °C warming will be 10 times higher than in the reference period 1986–2005 and three times higher than in 2006–2015. Yet, climate change mitigation, limiting the temperature increase to 1.5 °C, can considerably reduce the annual drought losses in China, compared with 2.0 °C warming. We project drought losses in China under global temperature increase of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C, based on the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), a cluster analysis method, and “intensity-loss rate” function. In contrast to earlier studies, to project the drought losses, we predict the regional gross domestic product under shared socioeconomic pathways instead of using a static socioeconomic scenario. We identify increasing precipitation and evapotranspiration pattern for the 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C global warming above the preindustrial at 2020–2039 and 2040–2059, respectively. With increasing drought intensity and areal coverage across China, drought losses will soar. The estimated loss in a sustainable development pathway at the 1.5 °C warming level increases 10-fold in comparison with the reference period 1986–2005 and nearly threefold relative to the interval 2006–2015. However, limiting the temperature increase to 1.5 °C can reduce the annual drought losses in China by several tens of billions of US dollars, compared with the 2.0 °C warming.