China is feeling the burn
FROM floods and famines to droughts and dirty air, Beijing knows it must act on climate change because it has more to lose – and potentially more to gain – than any nation on Earth.
Recent research by ANU economics professor Warwick McKibbin (inset below) shows China gets smashed by even more extreme climate events than Australia – nearly three times as many in the past 120 years – and when they hit, they cause more deaths, affect more people, cost more, and lead to greater productivity losses.
“China has the biggest negative impact from climate change, and they know that,” Prof McKibbin said.
The renowned economist said he calculated China’s losses from air pollution (pictured above) in a report for the country’s premier in the 2000s, and he found the cost was stupidly high – up to 6 per cent of GDP. “That was from people dying, people being sick, and damage to infrastructure from high pollution impact,” Prof McKibbin said.
“They have one of the highest GDP losses out of all the larger emitters, so it’s in their interest reduce emissions as part of a global agreement.”
In Australia, concerns around climate change have centred mainly on droughts, bushfires and coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, but’s it’s a different set of issues impacting life in the world’s most populous nation. Water security, cyclones and storms, sea level rises, heatwaves and desertification are just some of the big environmental problems China is facing.
“The big bread bowl in northeast China – sort of the equivalent of the midwest of the US – produces a lot of food for that country, and it is drying out,” Will Steffen from the Climate Council said. “They are already suffering a drying trend, and the evidence is accumulating now that that’s an effect of climate change, so they have an exceptionally strong vested interest in getting climate change under control,”
Professor
Steffen said.