The impacts of climate change on different sectors of society are interrelated.

Drought can harm food production and human health. Flooding can lead to disease
spread and damages to ecosystems and infrastructure. Human health issues can
increase mortality, impact food availability, and limit worker productivity. Climate
change impacts are seen throughout every aspect of the world we live in. However,
climate change impacts are uneven across the country and the world — even
within a single community, climate change impacts can differ between
neighborhoods or individuals. Long-standing socioeconomic inequities can make
underserved groups, who often have the highest exposure to hazards and the fewest
resources to respond, more vulnerable.

Climate change is impacting production costs, reducing delivery speed, and affecting the
quality of goods delivered to the end-user. Unpredictable natural disasters arising due to
climate change are increasing the fragility of the supply chain industry.

Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment.
Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and
animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner.
Climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have
come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates. These changes have a
broad range of observed effects that are synonymous with the term.

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic caused unprecedented, worldwide

supply-chain disruptions, but experts say that’s a drop in the bucket
compared with the disruptions that climate change will cause.

Wildfires in the American West, flooding in China and Europe, and drought
in South America are already disrupting supplies of everything from lumber
to chocolate to sushi rice.  

“Whether you’re in the agricultural sector or the forestry sector, or the tech
sector, there is no particular sector that is immune from climate change,”
said Christy Slay, senior director of science and research applications at
The Sustainability Consortium.