Worst Summer Rains In 60 Years Lash Southern China

SOUTHERN CHINA HAS been seeing its heaviest summer rains for 60 years, bringing floods, widespread destruction of crops and more disruption to supply chains.

Hundreds of thousands of Guangdong and Guangxi residents living around the Pearl River delta have been evacuated after a week of persistently high rains. State media have aired footage of people being rescued with ropes and rubber dinghies, and cars floating down streets. Several cities in Guangdong have raised their flood alerts to the highest level.

The rain has disrupted manufacturing and shipping, already suffering under strict anti-Covid measures. Particularly in the more mountainous north of the province, where the flooding is most severe and landslides have happened, businesses were ordered to close temporarily, and public transport was suspended as rising waters approached dangerous levels. The direct economic loss so far is estimated at more than 1.7 billion yuan ($250 million).

To the north of Guangdong, Jiangxi province has also raised its flood warnings. Officials report direct economic losses already reaching 470 million yuan, with 43,300 hectares of crops inundated.

In neighbouring Hunan province, 21,607 hectares have been damaged, and there are reports of landslides and building collapses.

China’s National Meteorological Center warned that downpours could continue for another week, although the heaviest rains are expected to move northwards across central China from mid-week.

In recent years, climate change has made the south wetter and the north hotter and drier.

Severe Floods Compound China’s Year Of Crises

IN ANOTHER YEAR, the worst flood season in more than two decades would be a significant crisis to test authorities. The damage to crops and livestock from June and July’s torrential rains, precipitation that was far heavier than usual, is substantial, and a reported 3.7 million people have been displaced. But the economic loss — put by state media at 145 billion yuan ($21 billion) as of the end of July — is not as severe as that caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Yangtze and its tributaries in Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui in central and eastern China are the areas worst affected by the flooding, with the response in Jiangxi said to be on ‘a war footing’. Thanks to improved flood control and emergency management, however, the death toll has been relatively light for the scale of the disaster: 158 people dead or missing, according to the latest available figures.

Early in June, a 1960s-era dam in Guangxi collapsed under the pressure of building floodwaters, raising concerns about the safety of hundreds of other similarly aged dams, and for the massive and iconic Three Gorges Dam (seen above) on the Yangtze (which is of later vintage, having not been completed until 2003).

Those concerns were amplified by state media reports of non-critical parts of the dam becoming slightly deformed’, although the main structure was said to be intact. Its collapse would be a disaster not only in human terms for the millions of people who live downstream, but also the Party. Its flood gates have had to be raised repeatedly to ease the pressure — and again three times this week ahead of a renewed surge in floodwaters expected on Friday — but so far, so good.

None the less, the impact on agriculture is being reflected in the pick-up in inflation in July as food prices rise. More than two-thirds of China’s rice is grown in the Yangtze basin, and this year’s crop would have been near to harvest when it was flooded.

Authorities have been releasing crops from strategic reserves both to ensure adequate supply and to keep a lid on inflation. This includes more than 60 million tons of rice, 50 million tons of corn and more than 760,000 tons of soybeans, surpassing the volumes released during the whole of 2019.

Food price inflation-driven civil discontent remains authorities’ perennial concern.

China’s Natural-Disaster Displacement Risk Quantified

China: Disaster-related displacement, 1970-2013. Source: IDMC

CHINA ACCOUNTS FOR a disproportionate share of the world’s disaster-related displacement. That is not only a function of the size of its population. The country is at high-risk of being stricken by drought, seasonal floods, cyclones, earthquakes and landslides induced by the latter two.

Drought and cyclones are the most costly; earthquakes and floods the big killers. Some 130 million inhabitants are exposed to these risks. More than 8 million of them every year are at risk of being displaced, according to a new analysis of regional displacement risk by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Disaster-induced displacement has been increasing and is likely to continue to do so. For one, population growth and the increased concentration of people and economic activity in hazard-prone areas such as coastlines and river deltas are swelling the numbers of people exposed to natural hazards.

Second, better early warning systems and evacuation planning means that more people survive disasters even as their homes and property are damaged or destroyed. Third, climate change is making extreme weather both more frequent and severe.

The richer a country gets, the more resilient it is to natural disasters, not least of all because it has more to lose, so they take steps to protect what they have. Yet though they suffer fewer natural disasters those that do occur are more severe.

Since 2008, China has suffered three disasters that displaced more than 3 million people, five that displaced 1 million-3 million people and 34  that displaced between 100,000 and 1 million people.

All that helps explain why China has the highest absolute risk of disaster-related displacement in the region. It also ranks second in relative displacement for its population size — 6,082 displacements per million residents, after Laos’s 6,542 displacements per million inhabitants.

The IDMC predicts that over the next four years that the average number of displaced will rise to nearly 9 million and the per million ratio will rise to Laos’s current level.  Its study, which is regional, is intended to provide a forecast to help planners not so much to deal with natural disasters as to forestall their worst effects.

Drought Hits Northern China, El Niño Threatens Worse

EL NIÑO, THE periodic warming of sea-surface-temperatures in the Pacific, is already if prematurely being blamed for the worst drought to hit northern and central China in 60 years. State media says more than 27.5 million people are facing water shortages across at least six provinces.

Previous El Niños caused flooding in the southern rice-growing regions, as they did so disastrously along the Yangtze River in 1998, even as they brought drought to the wheat-growing provinces of the north. The extreme weather produced by El Niño in 1876–77 caused one of that century’s most deadly famines across Asia, with 13 million people dying from hunger in northern China alone.

While the latest El Nino conditions are only just starting to form in the Pacific, they are exacerbating the hot, dry weather in northern China, which was already suffering from serious water shortages as a result of years of deforestation, industrialization and urbanization.

The previous El Niño in 2009 triggered a sharp fall in wheat output. State media say that drought in Liaoning Province has so far devastated 2 million hectares of crops. An El Niño would ratchet up that number significantly.

Drought is also severe in Jilin, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Henan and Hubei, affecting a further 2 million hectares of crops. The overall effects on harvests could be significant. A break to a run of 11 consecutive years of rising wheat harvests looks likely. The key question is whether this turns out to be a short El Niño lasting a few months, or a more long-standing event lasting as long as a couple of years.

China is not alone in being affected by El Niño. The net effect around the Pacific could be to cut global grain harvests by upwards of 2%. Sugar, beef, cotton, palm oil, cocoa and coffee output could also be hit, pushing up prices of those commodities. China’s cotton fields are south of the Yellow River, and like the rice paddies, subject to El Niño-related flooding.

Lessons Of Beijing’s Floods

The flooding that hit Beijing a week ago (above) was a freak. The rains that caused it were the heaviest in 60 years. Severe weather, certainly, but not beyond the bounds of what a national capital should be prepared to deal with. And certainly not with as heavy a loss of life, 77 dead. It has revealed weaknesses in urban planning, construction, infrastructure and emergency management. “We must seriously reflect on these lessons and always bear them in mind,” Guo Jinlong, Party boss in the city, says. Quite.

Urban flooding is a worsening problem in China (and elsewhere) as global warming, urbanization and industrialization pose a growing triple threat to cities’ natural defences, especially those of cities in developing economies. But beyond the human costs are the economic disruption as transportation, communications networks and electricity supplies, the arteries of modern cities, are put at risk of seizing up. Authorities’s preliminary estimate of the economic cost of the recent floods in Beijing is 2.26 billion yuan ($360 million).

Over the past 30 years, floods have been getting bigger and more frequent around the world but no region has been more affected than the Asia-Pacific and no country in the region more than China. (A list of Asia’s worst floods since 2000 is here.) More than 100 million Chinese have moved from inland areas to flood-prone coastal cities in the past quarter of a century. Yet China has only recently started to shift its emphasis from reacting to urban flooding to preventing it, and, as it happens, at about the same stage in its development as Japan started to do three decades ago. Taiwan and South Korea have also since followed suit.

Floods in cities are both more costly and difficult to manage than those in the countryside. Building adequate main sewers and storm water drains to manage urban rainwater is straightforward enough in greenfield developments. The difficulties lie with older built-up areas. There sewers and storm drains are often old and inadequate, run-offs from hard surfaces absent, ground storage for rainwater scarce and ancient streams that could carry rainwater to rivers and ponds that could help it find its way to acquirers below, filled in. An irony of the Beijing floods is that the aquifer below the city is drier than ever. Redressing these problems are huge engineering tasks that cities cannot complete overnight. But starts have to be made. Beyond that are longer-term policy issues of not allowing development in flood-prone areas, giving local districts within cities the information to make their own local anti-flooding preparations, and making cities greener so they are less encouraging to extreme weather.

From 2011 to 2020, China’s investment in water conservancy projects, including flood defenses, is expected to reach 4 trillion yuan ($617 billion), almost four times as much as that spent during the previous 10 years. Yet nature has provided lakes and floodplains to do the same job. An important part of fighting floods, and one of China’s other perpetual natural disasters, drought, is the protection, restoration and reconnection of lakes, ponds, streams and floodplains so they can do what they do best: take in water when the river is high and give it back when it is low. Rivers and lakes cannot be infinitely sacrificed or bent to man’s will in the name of economic development. Urban planners have only just started to apply the lessons of that. China’s developers will have to be made to, too.

Flood And Drought Co-Exist In China

Despite heavy seasonal rains causing floods and havoc across southern China, the north and parts of the center of the country still face severe drought. Officials have warned that crops are at risk on the North China Plain between the Yellow and Huai rivers. More than 4 million people across eight provinces are short of drinking water. The lack of rain extends to the Korean peninsula across the Yellow Sea. The Associated Press reports that North Korea is facing its most extreme drought since records were first kept more than a century ago, threatening already tenuous food supplies.

China Warns Of Severe Floods

While drought persists in southwestern China, this year’s rainy season is bringing fears of extensive flooding elsewhere in the country. The national flood and drought prevention agency is warning of flooding along the Yangtze potentially more severe than the catastrophic floods of 1998 that killed 4,150 people. Water levels on the river’s middle and lower reaches are 1-3 meters higher than normal as a result of the recent torrential downpours and floods are already occurring along some of the river’s tributaries.

State media quote Wu Daoxi, who heads the agency’s Yangtze office, as saying that the chance for large-scale flooding is significantly higher now than in 1998. Other officials from the agency say that widespread floods are also likely to occur along the Huaihe river and localized ones along the Pearl river. Reservoirs are reported to be already filled to 80-90% capacity. Last Friday, Chen Lei, minister for water resources, called for reservoirs to be shored up to prevent flooding, saying that 40,000 were at risk of giving way. One that did, the Badoucun reservoir in Hunan, has resulted in a local official being sacked for not taking precautionary measures in time.

The potential damage caused by flooding is getting more severe because depletion of groundwater is lowering water tables and causing some 50 of China’s largest cities to sink Venice-like, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Hangzhou and Xian among them. We have noted before the potential explosive social costs of a water crisis getting beyond the government’s control. It will take a comprehensive program of water conservation, better water resource management and better husbandry of the ecosystem. And there are plans on all those fronts. But the weather is no respecter of five-year plans.

A Disastrous Half Year

With the death toll in Tibet from the recent northern Indian earthquake reaching seven, it is timely to remember that it has been a horrible year for disasters, and earthquakes in particular. Those in Japan and New Zealand were especially tragic and costly. Swiss Re, a reinsurance company, has completed its half yearly preliminary estimate of the cost of natural and manmade disasters worldwide. January to June saw economic losses of $278 billion, up from $166 billion in the same period of 2010. The Japanese quake and tsunami accounted for three quarters of the losses in the first half this year. Insured losses were $70 billion, up from $29 billion a year earlier. It was the second worse first half of the year since Sigma started keeping track.

Despite the severe drought and flooding in various parts of China in the first half of this year (and continuing into the second half, with the death toll topping 100 and more flooding possible as southern coasts brace  for Typhoons Nesat and Haitang), the country escaped the worst wrath of the weather. No Chinese event made the list of the five costliest disasters of the first half. However, one does in terms of the heaviest cost of all, life. The floods and landslides in June killed 305 people, which is fourth on Sigma’s list after the Japanese earthquake (20,362 victims), January’s floods and earthquakes in Brazil (>900) and the severe storms and tornadoes in the U.S. in April (354).

At this point, Swiss Re’s tally does not include what it calls “the full humanitarian and economic consequences of severe drought that caused wildfires and crop losses” in several parts of the world, including China. The full year report will likely make for grim reading.

Death Toll From China’s Rains Hits 70

The death toll from rain-triggered floods and landslides in central China has risen to 70 with 32 others missing, officials now say. The National Disaster Reduction Commission says more than 21 million people across eight provinces are now affected by the unusually late and heavy summer monsoon rains deluging Sichuan, Shaanxi, Henan, Chongqing, Hubei, Shandong, Shanxi and Gansu. Direct economic damages are put at an estimated 26 billion yuan ($4 billion). Hubei, Shaanxi and Sichuan have borne the brunt of it.

In the worst incident, a landslide that buried a brick factory and partially destroyed as ceramics plant in Baqiao, a suburb of Shaanxi’s provincial capital, Xian, 27 people are now reported dead with a further five missing. Rescue teams continue to recover bodies. (Update: The final death toll has been confirmed at 32 with the recovery of the last missing body on Tuesday, four days after the landslide.)

Meanwhile, the highest flood crest so far this year on the rain-swollen Yangtze river reached the Three Gorges Dam on Wednesday morning, raising the water level to 164 meters, 20 meters above the alert level.

Death Toll In Central China Flooding Nears 60

While drought persists in the southwest, heavy rains are proving deadly in Henan, Shaanxi and Sichuan. Officials at the Ministry of Civil Affairs say that 57 people have been killed and a further 29 are missing as a result of torrential rain-triggered flooding and landslides in the three provinces since the beginning of the month. More than 12 million people have been affected, with more than 1.2 million having to be evacuated. In recent days the rains have raised the levels of the Han, Wei and Jialingjiang rivers, leading to floods in 14 rivers and tributaries of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. Water levels at the Three Gorges Reservoir swelled to above 160 meters on the evening of Sept. 19, 16 meters higher than the alert level. Emergency relief teams have been sent to all three provinces where direct economic losses are put at upwards of 17 billion yuan ($2.7 billion) so far.