This time, local authorities took no chances: They halted bus services, closed tourist sites and warned residents to stay at home. Water pumps were deployed to prevent flooding in the underpasses. Subway entrances and exits were sealed off with sandbags and metal plates.
China’s summer began with a massive emergency response operation in several provinces to prevent now-routine extreme weather events from escalating into a political and humanitarian crisis for the Communist regime.
Last year’s record-breaking heatwave was followed in June by drought, floods and a typhoon, delaying crop planting in eastern Shandong province just weeks before the floods hit.
After decades of largely ignored campaigns by environmental activists, Beijing has made adapting to extreme weather a policy priority, with meteorological officials last week issuing an unusually direct warning about the country’s vulnerability to extreme heat and rainfall exacerbated by climate change.
The Ministry of Ecology and Environment also released its first progress report on adapting to climate change threats a month ago, highlighting the need for improved early warning systems and better coordination between departments responsible for construction, water management, transportation and public health.
“These departmental silos hinder a coordinated response to the climate issue,” said Liu Junyan, a Beijing-based activist with Greenpeace. “We’re all hiding in different places, dealing with our own crises, and we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture.”
Liu said the coordination would be key to saving lives in this year’s floods, as well as improving advance notice for residents in remote and mountainous areas where damage mitigation measures remain inadequate.
Forecasts for the rest of July underscore the sense of urgency: torrential rains are expected in 18 regions across the country. The government has deployed hundreds of soldiers, relocated tens of thousands of villagers and allocated $200 million for disaster relief.
The worst flooding this year is occurring in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in Hunan province, where evacuation orders were issued on Tuesday for four towns in Pingjiang county.
China’s second-largest freshwater lake collapsed 740 feet over the weekend, rekindling a debate about whether farming and industrialization are encroaching on wetlands that are good at absorbing rainfall.
China’s adaption problems are compounded by huge differences in wealth and geography: Most of the country’s 1.4 billion people live in crowded, concrete neighborhoods that are prone to flooding during heavy rains. Its factories and financial centers are concentrated along the low-lying east coast.
While local governments recognize the importance of climate change, “differences in economic development between regions mean there are gaps in their ability to prevent, resist and respond to disasters,” said Tang Xu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Shanghai’s Fudan University.
Tang, a former director of the Shanghai Municipal Meteorological Bureau, listed a number of disasters that various regions have faced in recent years, including drought in the northwest, landslides and mudslides in the southwest, and typhoons and high tides on the east coast, and stressed why “disaster prevention is a difficult job.”
As a result, some are working faster to find and address risks, while others are taking longer, Tan said, but at least everyone is now aware of the issues. “You can’t hold everyone to the same standards to judge who’s doing a good job and who’s doing a bad job,” he said.
The central government in Beijing is calling on local authorities to do more.
China is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather intensified by climate change, the China Meteorological Administration stressed in its annual “Blue Book” report on the issue, released last Thursday, citing mounting evidence of the threat, including record temperatures last year that caused glaciers and permafrost to melt faster than ever before.
Even more shocking than the report was the unusually stark warning from meteorological authorities that it was only going to get worse.
Yuan Jiashuang, deputy director of the bureau, told reporters at a press conference to release the report that within the next 30 years, China will experience 15 days of heat waves per year and temperatures will rise by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yuan stressed that northeastern Xinjiang will be one of the hardest-hit areas. Last July, temperatures in the Turpan depression, 500 feet below sea level, hit 126 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest in China’s history.
Over the same period, heavy rains lasting five days are expected to become more frequent, concentrated in the central and northeastern parts of the country, and eventually extreme weather rain and snow will exceed normal precipitation, Yuan said.
Only recently has the Chinese government begun to openly warn about the dangers of climate change. For decades, government officials accepted the scientific view but blamed wealthy, developed countries such as the United States for historically high carbon emissions.
A reliance on polluting coal-fired power and a massive construction boom have made the country the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, a position it finds difficult to maintain.
Within China, gradually warming air has been outweighed by concerns about clearing harmful smog that blankets major cities, and public debate and scientific research on the issue has been limited compared to Europe and North America.
That has changed dramatically in recent years, in part because Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants to be seen as a global leader on climate, and green technology is now also a key driver of China’s economy.
China installed more solar panels last year than the rest of the world combined, and the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2028 it will account for 60 percent of the world’s renewable energy installations.
It is widely believed among experts on China’s energy system that the country could reach peak carbon dioxide emissions sooner than the official target of “by 2030” if Beijing keeps an eye on local governments that continue to approve the construction of new coal-fired power plants.
But the focus on climate adaptation has also been driven by a series of almost annual natural disasters that highlight the threat of extreme weather to ordinary citizens and policymakers in Beijing.
For a Communist Party leadership that prides itself on its nature-defying engineering and disaster preparedness, the frequent crises are becoming a public relations nightmare for its carefully crafted image.
A year after deadly flash floods hit the city of Zhengzhou, a prolonged heatwave in 2022 has turned lakes into rivers, withered crops and sparked forest fires.
Last August, Beijing was hit by its heaviest rains since 1883. Authorities activated massive flood-evacuation systems at the expense of rural areas to protect the capital and newly developed areas personally backed by President Xi Jinping.
