China’s Newly Risen Cities Face the Threat of Rising Waters
collection of cities without considering their toll on the environment, much less the future impact of global warming. Today, the region is a goliath of industry with a population exceeding 42 million. Guangzhou now has more to lose from climate change than any other city on the planet, according to a World Bank report. Nearby Shenzhen ranked 10th on that list.
Researchers say the effects of climate change can already be seen — in higher water levels, increasing temperatures and ever-more severe storms. And climate change not only poses a menace to those who live and work here, or to the immense concentration of wealth. It is a threat to a world that has grown dependent on everything produced in the area’s factories.
The rising South China Sea and the Pearl River network lie just a meter or so below much of this new multitrillion- dollar development — and they are poised to drown decades of progress, raising prices on goods like smartphones, biopharmaceuticals and even the tiny springs inside ballpoint pens.
China today is crippled by air pollution. New research shows that rising temperatures and stagnant air resulting from climate change — caused largely by worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide — are exacerbating China’s smog crisis, which has contributed to millions of premature deaths.
The Chinese government has become an outspoken voice on climate change. President Xi Jinping has urged the signatories of the 2015 Paris climate accord to follow through on their pledge, while state-run Chinese media has criticized the Trump administration for “brazenly shirking its responsibility on climate change.”
China is now the world leader in domestic investment in renewable energy. But stronger mandates haven’t overcome the pace of expansion, a decentralized fiscal system, lax enforcement and a culture that frequently pits growth against green. The country continues to consume as much coal as the rest of the world combined.
Here in Guangdong Province, all the new cars, the concrete and the belching factories spike temperatures, creating urban heat islands and i ncubating pandemics l i ke dengue fever, an outbreak of which slammed Guangzhou in 2014, afflicting 47,000 people. On top of this are the floods and tidal surges, worsened by a mix of increasingly severe storms and land sinking under the sheer weight of development — amplifying the impact of rising waters. The f looding overwhelms hastily planned buildings and neighborhoods with overstressed sewage systems.
Shenzhen was still a sleepy fishing village of some 35,000 during the late 1970s when the Chinese authorities declared it a Special Economic Zone, bringing in huge investments and waves of migrants from the countryside who have helped make what today is a metropolis of 11 million. Cai Yanfeng arrived during the early 1980s as a toddler with her parents. Now an urban designer, she has seen the city’s evolution and, at 36, is a relative old-timer.
She was recalling her childhood, when she would cross the street up the block from where a Starbucks is now to play in the mangrove swamps hugging the bay. Today, the street she used to cross is the size of a multilane highway. Where the mangroves started, a hospital campus flanks a shopping mall. The mangroves were ripped out, replaced by landfill, and smothered by hectares of concrete, asphalt, office towers, high- rise apartments and industrial development.
“It started with amusement parks along the beach,” Ms. Cai remembered. “Then the city built another big road near the sea, with the area filled in between with residential blocks. Things sped up after that.”
Mangroves provide a buffer from the sea, reducing the impact of waves and rising water, filtering out salt that can infiltrate freshwater reserves, absorbing carbon and lowering ambient temperatures. But about 70 percent of the mangroves in Shenzhen are gone. And their disappearance is accelerating: 850 hectares paved over between 1979 and 1985; 2,700 more during the next decade; thousands more since.
Liang Bo, who works for the Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands and Conservation Foundation, walked through a waterfront park that’s more or less where Ms. Cai once played in the mangroves. Along the shore, garbage washed up on the rocks from the murky, gray water in the bay. “It’s worse at low tide,” Ms. Liang said. “You really see how filthy it has become.”
Because of all the landfill and new development, she said, water no longer flows in and out of the bay as it once did. So garbage gets trapped, stagnation gets worse, fish are killed off. That scenario is repeated throughout the delta.
“The sea, the wetlands and mangroves used to be part of people’s lives here,” Ms. Liang pointed out. “But most of the people who live here now weren’t around when the mangroves were still here. They see this park, which makes us more vul- nerable to rising seas and typhoons, as they do all the tall buildings and highways. They equate it with progress.”
“Air pollution is a direct challenge to people, it’s right in their face,” said Ma Jun, founder and director of the citizen-led Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing. “It’s about the food they put on their table for their children. So they’ve made noise, and things have changed in terms of air pollution policy by the Chinese authorities.”
Storms, like hot days, happen all the time — and they have always happened. So people don’t automatically chalk them up to climate change. Climate change is like the tortoise. Development is the hare.
Mr. Ma said: “There is no obvious, short- term solution to climate change problems, no clear strategy everybody agrees is what needs to happen to offset climate change. And there’s no certainty about how to pay for what needs to be done. So there’s reluctance to address the issue. What’s the business model?”
That’s a trillion- dollar question, according to the World Bank, which projected the potential cost of damage to coastal cities worldwide from rising seas to be somewhere near that figure. It estimates that China is already losing 1.4 percent of its annual G. D. P. to climate change. Last spring, residents in Guangzhou woke again to flooded streets after a furious downpour swept across the delta. Rains brutalized many other cities throughout southern China last year: More than 160 people were killed by drowning and landslides, dozens went missing, 73,000 homes collapsed and 400,000 hectares of farmland were destroyed.
While Guangdong now claims more billionaires than any other province in the country, it is also home to millions of low-wage workers and migrants from the countryside who have settled in cheaper, poorly maintained neighborhoods, the crumbling legacy of humongous Socialist- era housing developments.
To the east, an immense, modern district called Tianhe has risen from next to nothing in 30- odd years, its offices and apartment blocks now overshadowed by the super-tall skyscrapers of Guangzhou’s Zhujiang New Town, with its opera house by Zaha Hadid and its signature Canton Tower. The picture-postcard image of New Town can bring to mind American downtowns from the late 20th century — cities like Atlanta or Phoe- nix, only glossier and on a vast scale.
“The cities we now have are partly based on what we saw in American movies — on the dream of big malls, airports, highways and tall buildings,” said Zhou Jianyun, an architect and professor who moved to Guangzhou as a student in the early 1980s. “This became our idea of progress,” he added. “Only we wanted to do everything bigger, because we thought that is what it meant to be modern. The actual needs of the real city are ignored.”
“China’s feelings about modernization keep changing,” said Zhou Ming, an urban planner in Shenzhen who expressed some optimism for the future.
“Before the opening to the outside world, people didn’t have food to eat,” he said. “So they focused on jobs and basic needs. Now wages are going up for workers, people are concerned about air pollution and they are starting to value traditional culture again, meaning neighborhoods that are human-scale and not just a bunch of skyscrapers.”
Rising wages and threats of stiffer pollution standards have prompted less scrupulous manufacturers to move their businesses to countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, where regulations are weaker.
Planners and environmentalists here talk about a chance to rebrand Guangdong Province as a global leader in green, cutting- edge industrial technology and urbanism. China recently announced that it wanted to create a national market for greenhouse gas quotas.
Prosperity will ultimately belong to cities and nations around the world that find ways to capitalize on strategies of resilience against the inevitable impact of climate change.
China has demonstrated that it can be nimble and ingenious. Since 1997, Guangzhou has opened an entire new metro system with scores of stations, covering hundreds of kilometers; Shenzhen has done the same in only a dozen years. But little of this was conceived in anticipation of extreme conditions and climate change. Rising waters repeatedly reduced train traffic in the delta to a crawl last year.
“What climate change says is that if you want to maintain the city as a good place to live and work for everyone, business as usual won’t do,” said Robert J. Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton in England. He helped write the World Bank report of the fiscal impact of climate change on the Pearl River Delta. “Disasters will become more likely. And the last thing the Chinese want is a Katrina event,” he added, referring to the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005.
Flooding is not an insurmountable hurdle, he noted. The Chinese can build smarter cities — healthier, safer, more equitable and humane ones, with restored waterways and waterfronts, flood- proof buildings, wide-reaching air-pollution controls, earlier warning systems, levees that double as parks, neighborhoods less dependent on cars.
“The challenge for the Chinese, as it is for so many others,” Mr. Nicholls said, “is taking the long view.”