China Tastes the Lash But the Whole Neighbourhood Feels the Sting

Conventional wisdom holds that China will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. Maybe, maybe not.

While climate change has been bumped off the radar of public consciousness by the Covid-19 pandemic, China has been getting a taste of the lash, a sampling of what lies in store. In addition to man-made contamination of its soils and freshwater resources, China faces enormous challenges from greater-than-average sea level rise, heavy rainfall patterns in the south and widespread drought across the agricultural north.

China is one of those hot spots that is heating much faster than average. One impact of this is sea level rise that imperils coastal cities in the industrialized south.

From 1951 to 2019, China's temperature rose an average of 0.24 deg C every ten years, according to the Blue Book on Climate Change published this week by the National Climate Centre. 

The centre is China's top climate research centre and is affiliated with the Meteorological Administration. 

Average sea level rise near China's coastal regions was 3.4mm per year from 1980 to 2019, faster than the global average of 3.2mm per year from 1993 to 2019. Last year, the level rose 24mm from the previous year and was 72mm higher than the country's average from 1993 to 2011.

China has been one of the countries most impacted by climate change, with rising sea levels threatening to submerge coastal mega cities like Shanghai if action isn't taken to cut emissions.

Flooding due, in part, to a late monsoon also hammered southern China.

Scenes of devastation have played out across China, particularly in the central Yangtze River Basin, over the last two months as the summer monsoon has unleashed record rains and floods. Millions of lives have been upended this summer, but climate experts warn that China will face more frequent severe floods as the global temperature rises, driving up the number of intense rainstorms in the country.

China shares this fate with many nations: 70 percent of the world's population is expected to experience greatly increased river flooding if global warming goes unchecked. This summer alone, flooding along the Brahmaputra river has displaced about 3 million people in India, and one quarter of Bangladesh is underwater. Lower-income countries like India will have a higher mortality rate from flooding compared to China, according to a 2018 study, but China will also be greatly impacted.

Researchers project that, in terms of damage and the number of people impacted, China is the country most vulnerable to flooding if the temperature rises 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, roughly the warming projected for the end of the century if action isn't taken to curb global warming.

China is responding with a "sponge city" policy whereby municipalities will construct reservoirs to capture monsoon rains instead of discharging that rainwater via storm sewers into already overloaded rivers.

Beijing is not only facing worsening threats from sea level rise and monsoon flooding, those are being compounded by worsening, severe droughts.

Food security is imperiled. China assures the public that the grain harvest was massive but then urges them to eat less. Meanwhile farmers are withholding their crops from markets.

The manager of one of two privately-owned “wheat purchase stations” in the town of Donghong – which encompasses Wang’s village – said his purchases had fallen by about 44 per cent this year due to a drop in output and reluctance among farmers to sell.

“Last year the farmers rushed to sell all the wheat they harvested,” said the man surnamed Zhu, while a large screen blinked behind him with closed-circuit television images of his storehouse. “This year they have generally chosen to keep more reserves under their own roofs.”

Wheat output in the area had fallen roughly 30 per cent to 40 per cent from a year ago, said Zhu, adding the “official figures may have been produced to assure the public”. 

Zhu’s claim is not supported by any official data and the Henan provincial government has said the summer harvest was at “an all-time high”.

It sounds like China is taking a page out of Donald Trump's playbook. Just say everything's fine.

On the pathogen front, the Lancet reports on a rather nasty tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, that has spread from eastern Asia to become established in the United States.

H longicornis was found to be present in ten countries, predominantly in eastern Asia, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. The tick was known to feed on a variety of domestic and wild animals, and humans. At least 30 human pathogens were associated with H longicornis, including seven species of spotted fever group rickettsiae, seven species in the family of Anaplasmataceae, four genospecies in the complex Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, two Babesia species, six species of virus, and Francisella, Bartonella, Coxiella, and Toxoplasma, which were mainly reported in eastern Asia. The predictive modelling revealed that H longicornis might affect more extensive regions, including Europe, South America, and Africa, where the tick has never been recorded before.

 China's neighbours are also worried that the same climate change impacts could upset the security balance across the the Indo-Asia Pacific region. That was the subject of an ASEAN virtual conference earlier this month.

As well as the immediate physical impacts, climate change will increase food and water insecurity, contribute to forced migration and displacement, and challenge disaster response and recovery capabilities. The unprecedented hazards it creates will compound a broad spectrum of conventional, unconventional, and hybrid security risks and challenges. These include increasing geostrategic competition, maritime boundary disputes, the expanding military capabilities of many countries in the region (three of which are seeking to develop nuclear triads), WMD threats from North Korea, ongoing conflicts linked to separatist movements and transnational violent extremist organizations, and piracy and serious organized crime. The interaction between climate change impacts and this complex and evolving regional security landscape is likely to give rise to new and potentially catastrophic risks, which will emerge in ways that are perhaps foreseeable, but difficult to predict.

Changes in the oceans are a particular focal point. The Indo-Asia Pacific’s coastal megacities and its far-flung island nations are highly vulnerable to sea level rise, storm surges, and saltwater intrusion into freshwater aquifers. Rapid depletion of fish stocks is already impacting food security across the region, and ocean acidification and rising temperatures will accelerate the trend, further straining the international rules-based approach to fishing governance. This could in turn increase tensions, violent confrontations, and military brinksmanship over the multiple overlapping and competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The nuke circus, also known as South Asia, worsens under the weight of climate change.

Reduced or altered water flows in the Himalayas and Indus river basin could further degrade the already tense India-Pakistan relationship by stressing the Indus Water Treaty, or necessitating more silt-clearing dam designs. This creates the potential for bad-faith actions, misunderstandings, or scaremongering, for example around fears that India might intentionally release floodwaters, or that Pakistan may accuse India of doing so in the context of climate change-driven flooding. The Indus river system is particularly crucial to Pakistan’s economy and energy security, and a Chinese partnership to build a cascade of five dams in Pakistani-held Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province under the Belt and Road Initiative has already raised concerns in India over sovereignty. Such dynamics threaten to deepen distrust and increase tensions between states, and this is without the climate-driven threat to water supplies. The complex nature of the two countries’ joint dependence on the Indus river system creates a high-stakes situation where climate impacts could drive and compound tensions, which might easily lead to hostilities, or otherwise worsen the confrontation between the two countries. 

Chronic conflict has made countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan more vulnerable to climate stress, by eroding their resilience and coping capacities, and this in turn helps to create the conditions for continued violence. As the world’s top opium producer, Afghanistan’s drug trade may even stand to benefit from climate change, as it relies on a drought-resilient, water-efficient, and highly lucrative poppy crop which is well-suited for projected climate changes. The Taliban thrives on the opium trade, which may strengthen their negotiating position or further disincentivize pursuing a peace deal with the Afghan government. Farmers, armed opposition groups, and corrupt government officials might also see more advantage in opposing central government authority in drug-producing areas. The growing regional drug trade is already driving serious organized crime across the Indo-Asia Pacific. If climate change makes it easier to grow opium poppies, it could supercharge the effect.

You can read the IMCCS report here.