The current emission trajectory for the globe is rising faster than the most pessimistic emission scenarios envisioned in the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. Despite large uncertainties, a recent World Bank report warns that it is increasingly plausible that this has put the world on a 4°C average warming path within the twenty-first century.
Such climate developments, their implications, and the resulting potential impacts—some very likely, others characterized by great uncertainty—are, of course, relevant for the population giant China. Similar to challenges faced by nations the world over, China is scrambling to understand the potential impacts of future climate scenarios. Given its dense population, extensive coastline, and large area, China remains vulnerable to both gradual climate shifts and increasing climate extremes. In the next sections, I review two particularly vulnerable sectors—water and agriculture—and describe how the nation is gearing up to strengthen its climate resilience in these areas.
Climate-Induced Impacts on Water and Agriculture
Assessments of China’s vulnerability to climate change suggest that due to extremes in temperature and precipitation, the nation’s agricultural sector faces significant impacts, mainly from water-related events of flood and drought, accompanied by a very low level of preparedness. This combination spells trouble for China’s 240 million farming households and the future of food security in the nation.
How will this happen? Climate change threatens to cause more water stress and increase frequencies of severe droughts and floods. Due to China’s expansive and varied topography, it is feared that this will translate into significant socioeconomic losses in the twenty-first century. In the past 20 years, for example, droughts in China resulted in average annual grain production loss of more than 16 million metric tons (MMT), with a record level of 60 MMT loss in 2000. According to the Ministry of Water Resources’ “2010 Statistic Bulletin on China Water Activities,” over the same period, droughts also diminished drinking water supplies for nearly 28 million people and 22 million livestock annually. One strategy to help the nation avoid risks of grain shortages is China’s foreign farming policy, which is essentially a strategy of land purchases or leases abroad to guarantee its food security. This policy, known as outward investment, is part of a larger set of policy initiatives set out clearly in the Outward Investment Sector Direction Policy of 2006.
China is a global player in terms of overall food production, so as they say, “A sneeze in China’s agricultural production can give the whole world a cold.” In a globalized world with complex interconnections from trade, grain production decreases and resulting reliance on imports have the potential to extend far beyond national boundaries and discussions about China’s domestic food self-sufficiency. For example, if in coming years, China’s wheat production decreases by even 10 percent, this implies a reduction of 11.5 MMT, an amount of wheat equivalent to 20 percent of U.S. wheat production in the same year. This would send a shock through global commodity markets and drive up prices. The following graph (see Figure 1) depicts China’s dominance in global wheat production; trends are similar for maize and rice. Such production quantities indicate the magnitude of China’s crop production, yet China’s demand for basic grains is still increasing.
Figure 1: Country-level wheat production in 2010. Source: FAO STAT at faostat.fao.org
Government Action
As a result of increasing concern over how best to mitigate climate change impacts, China’s central government has escalated climate change adaptation to the top of the nation’s policy agenda. To push the adaptation agenda, it released the China National Plan for Coping with Climate Changein 2008 and the action plan China’s Policies and Actions for Addressing Climate Change in 2012. Since 2010, the Ministry of Water Resources has also taken a number of measures to introduce strict water resources control by improving policies related to the development, utilization, conservation, and protection of water resources.
China has formulated several programs that focus on the water and agricultural sectors, including the following:
- National Integrated Water Resources Plan (2010–2030)
- 2011’s Document Number 1
- Seven Major River Basins’ Flood Control Plan
- National Plan to Guarantee the Safe Supply of Drinking Water to Urban Dwellers
These planning documents aim to enhance the adaptive capacity of the water sector and its associated domains. Most notably, on January 12, 2012, China’s State Council published a guideline to implement water resources management in China under the strictest water resource management criteria. The guideline sets management criteria based on three red lines outlined in the approved National Integrated Water Resources Plan (2010–2030) from the Ministry of Water Resources. The three red lines define the upper limits in terms of total amount, water-use efficiency, and water quality to guarantee the nation’s sustainable development. The red lines have not yet been publicly released.
Although the measures described above signal a political resolve to minimize climate-related risks, China’s policy makers and China watchers alike recognize that putting this agenda into action will take more than political resolve. It will be expensive and require high degrees of governance coordination, both through the vertical bureaucracy and across regions and communities. Based on China’s proven capacity to deal with the litany of obstacles faced in the past 30 years of economic reform, I believe that the nation has the capacity and resources not only to meet its climate change challenges, but to lead the world by example.
Dr. Christine E. Boyle has over 15 years of experience navigating China’s business and environmental landscapes. Receiving her PhD in environmental planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, Dr. Boyle is currently serving as CEO of Blue Horizon Insight, an analytics firm supporting governments and organizations’ ability to mitigate water-related risks in China and the US.
