As I see it | China’s extreme summer: now is the time for Beijing to let green groups get involved
- While climate change is driving a record-breaking drought and heatwave, the country also needs to look at industrial pollution, dam building and water diversion schemes
- Activism and debate on these sensitive issues has been shut down in the past decade, but the authorities need to ease controls and enlist support to tackle these challenges
Half the country has been hit by a record-breaking drought, made worse by more than 70 days of intense heat.
Sections of the largest river have run dry – a situation long feared by conservationists – crippling water and power supplies for megacities Shanghai and Chongqing and millions more in the Yangtze River basin.
Chinese meteorologists have warned that extreme heat events will be the “new normal”. The annual government report on climate, meanwhile, found China’s average temperatures rose faster than the global average in the past 70 years and are expected to remain “significantly higher” in the future.
While authorities point to global warming for the rise in extreme weather events, there are also other factors at play in China’s environmental challenges.
Industrial pollution, dam building and water diversion schemes have all contributed to the drought in the Yangtze River basin and other woes.
Upstream Sichuan province, for example, is among the areas worst hit by the energy crunch and water shortages. It is also where some of China’s biggest dams were built during the hydropower fever seen in the past two decades – it made up over 80 per cent of Sichuan’s power generation and 18 per cent of the country’s total in 2020.
