Chinese farmers dealing with climate change
Floods, heat, unstable weather causing issues
JIAOZUO, China — Wang Yuetang’s sneakers sink into the mud of what was once his thriving corn and peanut farm as he surveys the damage done by an unstable climate.
Three months after torrential rains flooded much of central China’s Henan province, stretches of the country’s flat agricultural heartland are still submerged in several inches of water. It’s one of the many calamities around the world that brought urgency to this week’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
“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 other nearby farms, shriveled 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 moldy, they can be sold only as animal feed, bringing lower prices.
The flooding disaster is the worst that farmers in Henan like Wangcan remember in 40 years — but it is also a preview of the kind of extreme conditions the country is likely to face as the planet warms and the weather patterns growers depend upon are increasingly destabilized.
“As the atmosphere warms up, air can hold more moisture, so when storms occur, they can rain out more extreme precipitation,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University. “Chances are extremely likely that human-induced climate change caused the extreme flooding you saw this summer in places like China and Europe.”
China, the most populous country in the world, with 1.4 billion people, is now the planet’s largest contributor to climate change, responsible for around 28 percent of carbon dioxide emissions that warm the Earth, though the United States is the biggest polluter historically.
As world leaders took part this week in the climate summit, China was criticized for not setting a more ambitious timeline for phasing out fossil fuels.
President Xi Jinping, who has not left China since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and did not attending the summit but sent a veteran negotiator, has said the country’s carbon emissions will level off before 2030. Critics say that’s not soon enough.
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 imperiling western China’s water supply and grand infrastructure projects such as the railroads across the Tibetan plateau.
Top government scientists also predict an increase in droughts, heat waves and extreme rainfall across China that could threaten harvests and endanger reservoirs and dams, including Three Gorges Dam.