HONG KONG — China is grappling with extreme weather emergencies across the country, with the worst flooding in decades submerging homes and cars in the south and record heatwaves in northern and central provinces causing road deformations.
Water levels in more than 100 rivers across the country have exceeded flood warning levels, according to People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party.
Rescue workers evacuating residents of Xinli village who were displaced by flooding after heavy rains this month in Shaoguan, China’s Guangdong province. Photo Via Reuters
Authorities in Guangdong province raised alerts to the highest level on Tuesday after days of rain and flooding, closing schools, shops and public transport in the affected areas.
The floods have affected the lives of almost half a million people in South China.
Images on state media showed rescue teams in boats rowing through flooded roads to help trapped residents.
In Shaoguan, a manufacturing hub, factories were ordered to stop productionas water levels reached a 50-year high, state television reported.
Guangdong’s emergency management department said the rains affected 479,600 people, ruined nearly 30 hectares of crops and caused the collapse of more than 1,700 houseswith financial losses totaling 261 million dollars, reported the official news agency Xinhua.
China has been dealing with summer floods for centuries, but this year’s floods have also coincided with heat waves that hit the northern part of the country, where heavy rains are also expected to move in the coming days, according to the Central Meteorological Observatory.
On Tuesday, temperatures reached a maximum of 40 degrees in nine northern and central provinces.
In Henan, road surface temperatures of up to 73 degrees Celsius last week created ruptures in cement roads that resembled the aftermath of an earthquake, local media reported.
Scorching heat in some of China’s most populous provinces has increased demand for air-conditioningwhich has generated a record use of electricity.
In Shandong, a province in northeast China with a population of 100 million, peak electricity load reached a record 92.94 million kilowatts on Tuesday, surpassing the 2020 peak of 90.22 million kilowatts, the state television.
Premier Li Keqiang said on Tuesday while visiting a thermal power company that the country should increase coal production capacity to avoid power outages.
Floods and heat waves in China this year have dragged on for days and weeks, as happened last year when weeks of flooding killed hundreds of people, caused power outages and displaced millions in central and southwestern China, including in Zhengzhou, where floods caught travelers in the metro.
The double climate emergency that China is experiencing reflects a global trend of episodes more and more frequent and prolonged periods of extreme weather events caused by climate change.
China has turned farmland into cities in recent decades, lifting millions of people in rural areas out of poverty.
But in its pursuit of economic development, it has also become the world’s biggest polluter, with greenhouse gas emissions higher than all developed nations combined.
Since then, Xi Jinping he has become the country’s first leader to commit to addressing climate change as a national priority.
China introduced a carbon market last July to curb emissions and in the past two decades has nearly quintupled the surface of green spaces in their cities.
But significant environmental damage has already been done.
The devastation and disruption resulting from greenhouse gases that have already been emitted are likely to continue for years to come.
@Zixu Wang in Hong Kong and Li You in Shanghai contributed reporting.
