Climate change in China: as farms are hit by extreme weather, ‘ordinary people suffer the most’
- While world leaders meet at COP26 in Glasgow to discuss the fate of the planet, growers in China are surveying the damage from extreme weather this summer
- Greenpeace East Asia expert says floods, rising sea level and other climate events are triggering a ‘national awakening’ in China
“There is nothing this year. It’s all gone,” Wang said. “Farmers on the lowland basically have no harvest, nothing.”
He lost his summer crop to floods, and in late October the ground was still too wet to plant the next season’s crop, winter wheat.
On nearby farms, shrivelled beanstalks and rotted cabbage heads bob in the dank water, buzzing with flies. Some of the corn ears can be salvaged, but because the husks are mouldy, they can be sold only as animal feed, bringing lower prices.
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Chinese government projections paint a worrying vision of the future: rising sea levels threatening major coastal cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and melting glaciers and permafrost imperilling western China’s water supply and grand infrastructure projects such as the railways across the Tibetan plateau.
Top government scientists also predict an increase in droughts, heatwaves and extreme rainfall across China that could threaten harvests and endanger reservoirs and dams, including the Three Gorges Dam.
Even after the most dramatic storms ceased, the water continued to pool in much of the surrounding countryside, a flat and fertile region.
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Here the economy depends on corn, wheat and vegetables, and other regions of China depend on Henan for food. The local government reported that nearly 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) of farmland were flooded – an area about the size of Connecticut – with damage totalling US$18 billion.
“All I could do at the time was to watch the heavens cry, cry and cry every day,” said Wang, the peanut farmer.
A limited number of rudimentary pumps were shared among farmers in Henan. Soft plastic tubes were stretched across fields to drain water, but they periodically burst, sending farmers running to patch holes.
A 58-year-old farmer who gave only her last name, Song, said everything she owned was submerged by the floods – her home, furniture, fields, farming equipment.
“Nothing was harvested. This year, the common people have been suffering all year long,” she said. “Ordinary people suffer most.”
“We have been working so hard, breaking our backs … without even a penny back, my heart aches,” said Hou Beibei, a farmer whose simple vegetable greenhouses – plastic tarps covering plots of aubergine, garlic and celery – remain flooded, her hard work washed away.
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She is worried about her two young children. “The tuition fees of the children and the living expenses of the whole family rely on this land,” she said.
Another threat to China’s coastal provinces is the rise in sea level. Government records show that coastal water levels have already risen around 121 millimetres (4.8 inches) between 1980 and 2017 and project that within the next 30 years, waters could rise an additional 70 to 160 millimetres.
Because China’s coastal areas are largely flat, “a slight rise in the sea level will aggravate the flooding of a large area of land”, erasing expensive waterfront properties and critical habitats, a government report projects.
“I think these impacts are triggering a national awakening. I think people are increasingly asking, ‘Why have extreme weather events like this happened? What are the root causes?’” said Li Shuo, a climate policy expert at Greenpeace East Asia in Beijing.
“I think this is bringing the Chinese policymakers and the general public to a realisation that we are indeed in a climate emergency.”