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A park flooded across the Pearl River in Qingyuan City, Guangdong, June 22, 2022 (Image: Alamy)
Xia Zhijian
October 19, 202231 October 2022
Large swaths of China suffered from the weather this summer. Floods, droughts, blackouts, wildfires, heat waves and heat stroke: the vocabulary of the crisis has filled the media, social networks and everyday conversations.
Guangdong experienced an exclusive flood in a century. Cities were flooded and thousands of people were affected. High temperatures and widespread drought led to days of power outages in Sichuan and Chongqing, and factories closed for family power supplies. Chongqing, ten forest fires broke out in a single week.
On June 7, before the start of summer, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and 16 other ministries published a National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change for 2035. This represents the latest indications of how China will adapt to climate change.
Compared to a previous edition published in 2013, the Strategy places more emphasis on adapting China’s social and economic systems, adding agriculture, cities and public health. It also takes into account the ability of sensitive industries to respond to climate change, as well as the climate resilience of infrastructure and primary engineering projects to cope with the existing economic downturn.
China is a global production hub, so the disorders here affect chains of origin around the world. As the climate changes, more common and extreme weather events will further destabilize chains of origin that have already been broken due to the pandemic and war.
On Aug. 17, the National Climate Center showed that the “regional heatwave incident” that began June 13 was the worst since records began in 1961. High temperatures and low rainfall have meant that the province, which relies on hydropower, has experienced electricity shortages. To ensure family supply, the government ordered the closure of factories from mid-August and asked citizens to reduce the use of air conditioners and other energy-intensive appliances.
As one media outlet noted, Sichuan broke 4 records during the summer. It recorded temperature, lowest precipitation, lowest river flows, and electric power demand for the time of year.
Sichuan is a key component of the global lithium battery trade supply chain. Emergency feeding restrictions Aug. 15-30 exacerbated an already complicated market. SMM. cn, a news story about the metallurgical industry, predicted that the restrictions would reduce August’s lithium carbonate production to 1250 tonnes and lithium hydroxide to 3050 tonnes, accounting for 4% and 14% of China’s total lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide production in August, respectively. The restrictions are over, but the recovery of production will take time. Huaxi Securities’ research indicates that top companies aim to catch up with long-term futures contracts and constant shortages in the spot market. Prices reflected this: battery-grade lithium carbonate charge 484,000 yuan ($67. 20) per ton on Aug. 12, but 503,000 yuan ($69. 85) on Sept. 9, breaking the 500,000 yuan mental value limit many had before the power shortage.
This is just one aspect of the effect of the heat wave and drought on Chinese industry. In mid-June and last June, Guangdong experienced another problem: flooding.
The province experienced record downpours in early summer. High water levels in the Bei River, a tributary of the Pearl River, have caused once-in-a-century flooding, threatening the Pearl Delta’s production base downstream. To producing cities such as Guangzhou and Foshan, the city of Yingde kept its doors closed, although several cities were flooded. Around 400,000 more people in the region were affected.
The one of the meteorological crisis is there. So how do you minimize losses?
Part of the answer lies in a more effective precautionary system. The main goals of the government’s strategy come with China’s ability to monitor and warn about climate change and extreme weather by creating teams to predict big data and synthetic intelligence, and allow sensitive industries to operate. Increased response to occasions of excessive weather and its consequences.
“I think it’s imperative to use real-time satellite monitoring, great knowledge and artificial intelligence to manage climate hazards and build an early precaution capability. And China is capable of doing it,” said Hu Xi, a member of Harvard University’s Department of Labor and Development. Working life program that studies the effect of climate on work, he told China Dialogue.
Meanwhile, companies at the lower end of the trade chain deserve to expand and diversify their supply chains instead of putting all their eggs in one basket, Mr. Hu said. You can no longer locate it. It wants to diversify the chains of origin to decrease this risk,” Hu added. “Abroad, there are supply chain knowledge corporations that can generate early warnings about origin chain issues. There may have been a flood somewhere, and it affected one of your provider’s suppliers. You can get live updates on this scenario and react in a timely manner.
Liu Chunsheng, an associate professor at Central University of Finance and Economics, said in an interview with Economic View that indexed corporations vulnerable to excessive weather have adequate precautionary and threat control systems in place. facilities, supply chain and logistics. Liu said climate threats and reaction plans are part of a company’s daily operations.
The Sichuan drought has highlighted the extreme weather vulnerabilities of China’s force systems as well as its supply chains. The strategy includes a segment on sensitive secondary and tertiary industries focusing on: climate resilience for the force sector; improving coverage and response to emergencies for electricity transmission and distribution networks; and advanced threat monitoring, warning, prevention, reaction and early recovery systems for electrical infrastructure. There has already been a debate in the media and beyond about how to secure a solid source of strength.
One technique is to push the deployment of new sources of force, such as wind and solar, adding in a distributed way, so that another bureaucracy of force can replace each other when needed. transmit electrical power back and forth, which would be interprovincial emergency power supply; and inspire the use of gas-fired power generation to ensure a solid supply. It remains to be seen what measures will be taken.
The pandemic, housing crisis and extreme weather are putting pressure on China’s economy. The government hopes to use infrastructure investments to stimulate economic expansion, which in the first part of the year was only 2. 5%. But infrastructure investment surpassed that figure, emerging 7. 4% from January to July, with the monthly rate of expansion expanding for 3 consecutive months from May.
Meanwhile, common extreme weather events pose a new risk to transport and other infrastructure. According to joint studies by Peking Normal University and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, heavy downpours caused by global warming make railway lines more likely to be affected by flooding and landslides. This can charge China’s railways up to $3. 53 billion a year if global warming exceeds an average of 3°C.
There is a pressing desire to lessen climate hazards in infrastructure investments. The government’s strategy calls for changes in the technical criteria for infrastructure and primary engineering projects for climate resilience. Initial and planning studies will be conducted for long-term changes, taking into account long-term weather trends, the Strategy says.
There are precedents for this approach. The South African government carried out a climate threat assessment when making plans for the expansion of Durban Port. The port design was strengthened to accommodate higher sea grades and more powerful storms, and an emergency response plan was developed.
“I think there are two facets to building the climate resilience of infrastructure,” Xi said. “First, apply climate models to build local infrastructure. Everyone has their own climate and this means we want very granular knowledge about climate risks. Second, perceive the weaknesses of the new infrastructure and apply higher standards. »
This will inevitably increase costs. Persuading investors to spit out the supplement is a headache around the world.
“Why aren’t the economic prices of climate replacement in infrastructure evaluated so much?Because no one understands the advantages of getting construction to higher standards, what is the economic value,” Hu Xi said. “That’s why so few people are doing climate adaptation. “
One of the few study papers on the functionality of advanced climate resilience in infrastructure is “Accelerating Climate Resilient Infrastructure Investment in China,” a paper produced through the World Resources Institute, in combination with China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation. , and the International Institute of Green Finance of the Beijing Central University of Finance and Economics.
After conducting case studies of water-efficient irrigation services in Ningxia, the structure of a sponge city in Wuhan, and the sea structure in Shenzhen, the researchers concluded that every yuan invested in climate resilience would yield between two and twenty times more in price than the next few years. 30 years. This price would take the form of avoiding losses (due to droughts, urban floods and typhoon surges), economic benefits and social and environmental benefits, such as reduced pollutants and a stronger climate.
The report highlighted that China faces a serious financing problem for climate-resilient infrastructure. An annual average of nearly 500 billion yuan ($69 billion) more is needed over the next five years, the researchers calculated.
National Climate Center Director Chao Qingchen told China Dialogue: “Everyone in China is taking climate replacement very seriously now. Every sector, every branch is thinking about climate adaptation. At the political level, we are talking about using monetary levers to direct investments. in a greener and weatherproof direction. But I don’t think we’ve implemented many of those measures.
Along with the lack of funds, there is an inability to assess the climate viability of infrastructure projects. Such testing would involve an investigation of the climatic suitability and hazards of any zoning or building plans that may be affected by weather conditions and have an effect on the local climate.
“Take for example the Tibet-Sichuan bullet train, which is under structure,” Chao Qingchen said. “A physically powerful climate threat assessment was needed along the direction at the design level before the structure began. We were concerned in this process, but a lack of knowledge of the region meant that the assessment was not detailed enough. And much evidence refers to beyond meteorological knowledge when long-term climate cannot be linearly extrapolated from the afterlife. This means that long-term threat testing isn’t exactly accurate. Modeled to assess long-term threats. The effects may be uncertain, but they would provide a benchmark.
Some countries are testing the use of weather models in infrastructure planning. Hu Xi told China Dialogue: “The UK and other countries require mapping developers to submit models of weather situations, and many resilience tests want to be carried out before the structure starts. I think that’s a practice that China could just adopt.
Chao Qingchen believes that meteorologists care more when building and executing a project.
“There are a lot of culverts on the line Tíbet-Sichuan. Se expect weather stations to be built at those sites of the line structure. The knowledge gathered in this procedure can be used to adjust the selected fabrics and adapt to potential long-term risks. But as I perceive it, there is still room for further cooperation and knowledge sharing between brands and meteorological authorities. “
In addition, greater cooperation would help assess the environmental impact of primary projects and the hazards involved as weather conditions change.
“In general, I believe that infrastructure projects require further assessment and investigation of climate hazards and environmental points at the design, structure and operation stage,” Chao Qingchen said.
We invite you to republish China Dialogue articles, online or in print, under the Creative Commons license. Read our republication rules to get started.
Xia Zhijian
Xia Zhijian is a freelancer founded in Chengdu, China, who focuses on environmental issues.
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