Can China balance climate and energy concerns as it endures more extreme weather?
- As China tries to mitigate environmental disasters while meeting economic demands, ‘the shocks reverberate globally’, expert says
It was 3.44am on June 19 and Tang Kaili, a housewares retailer in China’s southern city of Guilin, was sound asleep – when a short message from the local government appeared on her phone. It was an official alert that an upstream reservoir would begin releasing floodwater at 5am. Tang slept through it.
But few had expected that the latest release from the Qingshitan reservoir would be the final straw in a deluge that would lead to the most severe flood in the city since 1998.
By 8.50am, the property manager in Tang’s residential area had called her with a warning that the water level was rising quickly. Tang rushed out to discover the water was already up to her knees. She decided to wade through the streets to salvage what she could at her shop. By the time she arrived, much of the store was submerged.
“A property manager asked me to evacuate immediately when the water level rose to around 1 metre (39 inches). So I did. Later it rose to 1.6 metres,” she said. “When I came back the next day, my exquisite shop had turned into a mess of mud.”
“I invested one million yuan (US$138,000) in the shop. Now it’s all lost,” Tang said despondently. “Everything just happened too suddenly.”
Guilin is not alone in suffering through this summer’s extreme weather. Large swathes of China – 12 provinces across the south to the northeast – have been swamped by heavy rain and floods, while four others – Hebei in the north, central Shanxi and Henan, and eastern Shandong – have been hit by scorching droughts.
