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Climate change in China: as farms are hit by extreme weather, ‘ordinary people suffer the most’
- While world leaders meet at COP26 in Glasgow to discuss the fate of the planet, growers in China are surveying the damage from extreme weather this summer
- Greenpeace East Asia expert says floods, rising sea level and other climate events are triggering a ‘national awakening’ in China
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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.
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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 under several inches of water. It’s one of the many calamities around the world giving urgency to the United Nations climate summit under way 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 nearby farms, shrivelled 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 mouldy, they can be sold only as animal feed, bringing lower prices.
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The flooding disaster is the worst that farmers in Henan, such as Wang, can 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 destabilised.
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