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Updated November 2nd, 2021 at 15:51 IST

China's flooded farms face climate woes

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.

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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 are giving urgency to the UN climate summit under way in Glasgow, Scotland.

In the hardest hit areas of Henan, farmers are struggling after the floods destroyed most of their harvest.

Some of the corn ears can be salvaged, but because the husks are moldy, they can be sold only as animal feed at lower prices.

Hou Beibei's greenhouse garden of eggplants, garlic and celery remain flooded three months after the rains.

"We have been working so hard, breaking our backs … without even a penny back, my heart aches," said Hou.

With little income, she is worried about her two young children. "The tuition fees of the children and the living expenses of the whole family rely on this land," she said.

A 58-year-old farmer who gave only her last name, Song, said everything she owned was submerged by the floods — her home, furniture, fields, farming equipment.

"Ordinary people suffer most," she said.

The disaster was 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.

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% of carbon dioxide emissions that warm the Earth, though the United States is the biggest polluter historically.

As world leaders take part this week in the climate summit, China is being 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 will not be 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.

Meanwhile, China's people are already suffering the brunt of climate change. And in a common pattern around the world, those who have contributed least to the warming and have the fewest resources to adapt often feel the pain most acutely.

In late July, Chinese news broadcasts carried startling footage of torrential rains swamping Henan's provincial capital, Zhengzhou — at one point, 8 inches (20 centimeters) fell in a single hour — with cars swept away, subways flooded and people struggling through waist-deep water.

More than 300 people died as the megacity turned into an accidental Venice, its highways transformed into muddy canals.

Even after the most dramatic storms ceased, the water continued to pool in much of the surrounding countryside, a flat and fertile region.

Here the economy depends on corn, wheat and vegetables, and other regions of China depend on Henan for food. The local government reported that nearly 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of farmland were flooded — an area about the size of Connecticut — with damage totaling $18 billion.

A limited number of rudimentary pumps were shared among farmers in Henan. Soft plastic tubes were stretched across fields to drain water, but they periodically burst, sending farmers running to patch holes.

The summer also saw another climate-linked natural disaster in China. In July, the hottest month on Earth in 142 years of record-keeping, according to U.S. weather experts, a vast and toxic blue-green algae bloom spanning 675 square miles (1,748 square kilometers) engulfed coastal waters off the prosperous city of Qingdao, threatening navigation, fishing and tourism.

Another threat to China's coastal provinces is sea level rise. Government records show that coastal water levels have already risen around 4.8 inches (122 millimeters) between 1980 and 2017 and project that within the next 30 years, waters could rise an additional 2.8 to 6.3 inches (70 to 160 millimeters).

Because China's coastal areas are largely flat, "a slight rise in the sea level will aggravate the flooding of a large area of land," erasing expensive waterfront properties and critical habitats, a government report projects.

"I think these impacts are triggering a national awakening," said Li Shuo, a climate policy expert at Greenpeace East Asia in Beijing.

On a patch of land sitting next to the Qin River, Wang Yuetang is only just beginning to farm again on his once thriving corn and peanut farm.

He needs to start by paving the muddy soil with planks of wood, he said, as his sneakers sink into the mud.

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.

"Farmers on the lowland basically have no harvest, nothing" Wang said, "all I could do at the time was to watch the heavens cry, cry and cry every day."

 

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Published November 2nd, 2021 at 15:51 IST

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