Can China balance climate, energy concerns as it endures more extreme weather? (2024)

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.

For a week, torrential rain had been soaking Guilin, a tourist destination in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, known for its tranquil lakes, winding rivers and karst caves. Several reservoirs, no longer able to accommodate the massive volumes of precipitation, had been releasing their contents.

But few had expected that the latest release from the Qingsh*tan 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.

China has just experienced its hottest July and the hottest single month since 1961, according to the National Climate Centre, with the western autonomous region of Xinjiang, the eastern city of Hangzhou and the southern cities of Fuzhou and Nanchang sweltering for more than 20 days in temperatures of over 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).

The central government has not released the total death toll from the extreme weather episodes. But 30 people have been killed and another 35 reported missing since Typhoon Gaemi made landfall and hit the central province of Hunan, state media reported on Thursday. This came days after 15 people died in a landslide, as heavy rain swept away a guest house in the city of Hengyang, also in Hunan, on Sunday.

Before Gaemi, more than 20 rounds of flooding had hit China since April, leaving a trail of fatalities from Guangdong province in the south to Chongqing in the southwest and all the way to Hunan.

The extreme weather has impacted hundreds of millions of people, and caused losses worth billions of yuan. China is set to see a drop in its early-season rice harvest due to the floods in the production hubs of Jiangxi and Hunan, increasing pressure on annual output at a time when Beijing is fighting to strengthen food security.

China is well-versed in responding to natural disasters – from issuing warnings and taking precautionary measures, to mobilising the military, law enforcement, medical staff and volunteers for rescue and relief efforts. However, the country is being put to a new test by more sudden and violent episodes of extreme weather.

“Since the beginning of the 21st century, days of extreme heat in China have risen notably and so have the events of extreme rainstorms,” China’s Meteorological Administration (CMA) said in a report released on July 4. “China is especially vulnerable to extreme weather intensified by climate change.”

China’s annual average temperature last year was the highest since records began in 1901. Extreme heat and rainfall events have been intensifying. In coastal areas, average sea levels are rising more quickly, and glaciers in the western regions are melting faster than ever, according to the report.

Ronald Li Kwan-kit, an assistant lecturer with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a fellow of the Hong Kong Meteorological Society, said greenhouse gas emissions were largely to blame.

“Southern China typically receives heavy rainfall in the summer as part of the … monsoon season. But the intensity of the rainfall is likely affected by climate change, becoming more severe,” Li said.

Extreme weather is having a profound impact on economic activities. Li said storms were taking a serious toll on the shipping industry, and floods and droughts, happening more frequently and with greater intensity, were damaging China’s agriculture sector.

The fundamental solution is to reduce carbon emissions, Li said.

China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. In April 2021, President Xi Jinping said China would “strictly control” coal-fired power generation projects, reach peak consumption in 2025 and start phasing them out in 2026, as part of national goals for carbon emissions to peak before 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2060.

But those targets risk going off track, given that approvals for new coal-fired power plants increased fourfold over 2022 and 2023, compared with the five years from 2016 to 2020, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The spike came as China pushed for post-pandemic economic recovery.

“Given the centrality of China to the global manufacturing cycle, what happens in China obviously does not stay in China – the shocks reverberate globally,” said Sourabh Gupta, a senior policy specialist with the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington.

The long-term solution, according to Gupta, is for China to graduate up the value chain at home.

“[China needs to] pare down its carbon footprint in manufacturing, and export its cost-efficient green energy generation capabilities and associated services so that Global South countries can reap the benefits of lower-value manufactured goods exports based on cleaner and greener Chinese energy source inputs, as well as imported Chinese parts and components,” Gupta said.

But the focus on coal continues as geopolitical tensions with the United States and its allies make China more keen to pursue domestic energy and food security.

This has led to the rebound of coal power capacity expansion and the unscientific use of mountain slopes to plant crops, according to Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based non-governmental organisation.

“Such moves are against the carbon emission goals and would exacerbate the environment,” Ma said.

China’s law on flood control should introduce higher standards for flood-proof facilities and expand the application of technologies in extreme weather forecasts, pre-warning and the digital management of barrier facilities, dams and flood storage areas, he added.

The last revision to the law took effect in 2016.

The Ministry of Water Resources hosted a symposium on July 2 to gauge opinions from experts on further revisions to the law to “to solve new and old problems” in the battle against natural disasters.

Last year, China built at least two powerful machine-learning weather forecasting models. According to Li at Chinese University, their predictive accuracy for extreme weather, such as tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall, has been better than traditional forecast models.

Faith Chan, an associate professor in environmental sciences with the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, said China had made good progress in improving disaster preparations and responses, but their success ultimately rested with the government.

“The information from [the CMA] is open and free of charge, including radar images, satellite images, rainfall predictions and soil water content status, wind conditions, humidity, and temperature predictions. These practices are improving the disaster preparation and recovery processes,” Chan said.

However, he warned that while a “whole-nation” system could enable “more organised and useful practices” to tackle natural disasters, and minimise casualties and economic losses, “the lack of flexibility and [persistent] rigidness in dealing with disasters caused by extreme weather may affect the operational effectiveness”.

“There is increasing demand for [technologies], but I think the key is still the decisions from the government, plus how the technologies are used, [for example] big data or AI.”

“These technologies are very new to the communities,” Chan said, adding that in terms of handling disasters with such technologies, a wait-and-see approach would be best to determine their effectiveness.

Three years ago, more than 300 people died in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, when extreme rainfall and flooding inundated the city, immersing the subway system and trapping people in submerged vehicles. Experts described it as a “once in a thousand years” event.

The city has been a showcase in China’s “sponge city” programme, an initiative launched nationwide in 2015 to re-engineer cities to collect, purify and reuse floodwaters while reducing problems like urban heat island effect, freshwater scarcity and flooding.

But the programme has its limits, as it was only designed to help a city’s infrastructure withstand a once in 30 years rain event. Also, such upgrades can create a false sense of security, according to a study published in the journal Nature in June.

Last summer, after Beijing was hit by its heaviest rainfall in 140 years, the city opened up several zones in low-lying areas along waterways to help drain the floodwaters. Such zones are a central part of China’s flood control system. However, the decision caused farmland and homes to be submerged in neighbouring Hebei province, affecting more than 850,000 people.

The disaster left 51 people dead in Beijing and killed another 45 in Hebei, according to official data.

This summer, apart from Chongqing, Guangdong and Hunan, most regions or provinces affected by the floods have not reported any weather-related casualties.

The devastating floods that hit Guilin in 1998 lasted two months and hammered 24 provinces, killing more than 3,000 people and affecting another 220 million, official data showed.

Tang, the Guilin shopkeeper, said she was still waiting for compensation for the June floods.

“I’ve done the government registration to report property losses. Hopefully I can receive some money for a new start,” she said.