Chinese officials don’t usually go into detail on the challenges that climate change poses for the world’s most populous and largest carbon-emitting country. But in a speech on March 23, a top meteorologist warned of the severe risks facing China, including droughts, floods, falling crop yields, vanishing water supplies, and a “serious threat” to critical infrastructure projects such as the Three Gorges Dam.
The average surface temperature in China has been going up by 0.4F (0.23C) every decade since halfway through the last century, twice as fast the global average, said Zheng Guoguang, director of China’s meteorological administration in Beijing. Meanwhile, losses due to weather disasters since 2000 have amounted to 1 percent of gross domestic product, 8 times as high as the rest of the world. “As the world warms, risks of climate change and climate disasters to China could become more grave,” Zheng said. Below are the five biggest risks that Zheng outlined in his recent speech.
Threats to Infrastructure Projects
Warming temperatures are bad news for some of China’s biggest energy and transportation infrastructure projects. Those include the massive Three Gorges Dam, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway (the world’s highest and built on melting permafrost), a major gas pipeline supplying Shanghai and other Chinese cities, and the mammoth South-North Water Transfer Project, which aims to sate a parched Beijing. “The safe production and operation of major strategic projects is facing a serious threat,” Zheng said.
Food Insecurity
Climate change will also negatively affect China’s food security, Zheng said, particularly alarming for a country with a centuries-old concern with ensuring adequate grains for its huge population. Crop yields for wheat, corn, and soybeans are likely to fall, while river runoff will decrease or become “unstable,” he said.
Meanwhile, rice production in particular is likely to be adversely affected as temperatures rise, with eastern China among “the most vulnerable regions for reduced rice yield” in Asia (western Japan and the northern regions of South Asia are also at risk), wrote environmental journalist Joydeep Gupta, reporting on the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on website China Dialogue last March.
Extreme Weather
One particularly frightening impact will be a marked increase in extreme weather patterns, including more floods in regions of China and droughts elsewhere. Climate change will also lead to further deterioration of air quality in Chinese cities, already a notorious problem. Plus, unpredictable weather means constraints on “the development of wind and solar energy resources,” Zheng said, which are one part of the government’s plan to clean up the country’s air.
Cities at Risk
The typhoons that regularly slam China’s coast are expected to increase in frequency, the meteorologist noted. Rising ocean levels will put scores of Chinese cities at risk of being partially submerged, including the densely populated megalopolises of Guangzhou and Shanghai.
“More frequent floods and natural disasters such as typhoons are expected to erode [Shanghai’s] floodwalls,” wrote Michael Werz and Lauren Reed in Climate Change, Migration, and Nontraditional Security Threats in China, a May 2014 report by Washington (D.C.)-based Center for American Progress. “The potential inundation of Shanghai could cause a mass migration, shifting migratory trends and increasing resource pressure in other areas,” the scholars warned.
Spread of Illnesses
Finally, Zheng noted that climate change could have deleterious effects on the health of the Chinese public, particularly through the spread of mosquito-borne diseases including malaria and dengue fever (last year China saw its worst outbreak of dengue in two decades) as well as schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that often afflicts children who play in infected water.
“Changes in climate are likely to lengthen the transmission seasons of important vector-borne diseases and to alter their geographic range,” the World Health Organization wrote last August. “For example, climate change is projected to widen significantly the area of China where the snail-borne disease schistosomiasis occurs.”
Topics Flood China Climate Change
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