Hundreds of thousands affected by floods, landslides as heaviest rain in 60 years hits southern China

Hundreds of thousands affected by floods, landslides as heaviest rain in 60 years hits southern China

by Erry Ilham

Almost half a million people have been affected by floods and landslides in the Chinese province of Guangdong, according to authorities, after parts of southern China were hit by the heaviest downpours in 60 years over the weekend.

Flooding caused by the torrential rain has forced 177,600 people to relocate, destroyed 1,729 houses, damaged 27.13 hectares of crop and caused losses of more than $250 million, Guangdong's Department of Emergency Management said Tuesday.

Guangdong is one of at least seven provinces where the record rainfall has caused severe landslides and flooded roads, according to state media. In southwestern Guizhou province, swollen rivers spilled over roads, sweeping away cars and homes, videos on social media showed. The downpours come amid warnings by experts that extreme weather is becoming more frequent.

Precipitation in Guangxi, Guangdong and Fujian reached its highest since 1961, local weather bureaus said on Saturday, as those areas recorded an average rainfall of 621 millimeters (24.4 inches) in the 46 day period from May 1 and June 15, according to state news agency Xinhua.

That figure is equal to more than 90% of the countrywide average of 672.1 millimeters for the whole of 2021, based on data by the National Climate Center. Weather experts say conditions are ripe for further heavy rainstorms in the south of the country and heatwaves in the north

"Cold and warm air has converged over southern China, and the two sides have entered a deadlock and a tug of war," Wang Weiyue, an analyst at weather.com.cn, an arm of the China Meteorological Administration, told Reuters.Heavy rain is forecast to persist until Tuesday in the southern provinces of Guizhou, Jiangxi, Anhui, Zhejiang and Guangxi and then move northward.

China, the world's most populous country, with 1.4 billion people, is responsible for about 28% of Earth-warming carbon dioxide emissions, although the United States remains the largest polluter in history. As world leaders took part this week in a climate conference, China was criticized for not setting a more ambitious timeline for phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has not left China since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, did not attend the summit but sent a veteran negotiator, who said China could not abandon the country's carbon emissions before 2030. Chinese government projections paint an alarming vision of the future: rising sea levels threatening major coastal cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and melting glaciers and permafrost jeopardizing water supplies and infrastructure projects such as railroads across the plains.

Tibet. Government scientists also predict an increase in droughts, heatwaves and extreme rainfall across China that could threaten crops and endanger reservoirs and dams, including the Three Gorges Dam. Meanwhile, the Chinese people are already suffering from climate change. In late July, Chinese news broadcasts aired shocking footage of torrential rain flooding Henan Province's capital Zhengzhou at one point, sweeping away cars within an hour, flooding subway trains and people struggling through waist-deep water. More than 300 people died when the megacity was transformed into Venice. The highway turned into a muddy canal. Even after the most dramatic of storms has died down, the water continues to flow making most of the lush rural areas look like swimming pools. In this region the economy depends on maize, wheat and vegetables. China relies on Henan Province to provide food supplies.

The local government reported that nearly 1.2 million hectares of agricultural land were flooded with a total damage of up to 18 billion US dollars. "All I could do at that time was to see the sky crying, crying and crying every day," said Wang, a peanut farmer. A 58-year-old farmer, Song, said everything he owned was submerged in the floods, his house, furniture, fields, farm equipment and more. "There is nothing to harvest.

This year, ordinary people suffer all year round," he said. "We have worked so hard, broke our backs, without even a penny coming back, my heart aches," said Hou Beibei, a farmer who have a simple greenhouse covered with plastic tarpaulin. Her eggplant, garlic and celery plants are still flooded, her efforts are in vain. He is worried about his two young children. "`The children's college fees and the whole family's living expenses depend on this land,'' he said.