China report spells out ‘extremely grim’ climate change risks
By Chris Buckley; Editing by David Fogarty
17 January 2012 BEIJING (Reuters) – Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government’s latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself. The warnings are carried in the government’s “Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change,” which sums up advancing scientific knowledge about the consequences and costs of global warming for China — the world’s second biggest economy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas pollution. Global warming fed by greenhouse gases from industry, transport, and shifting land-use poses a long-term threat to China’s prosperity, health and food output, says the report. With China’s economy likely to rival the United States’ in size in coming decades, that will trigger wider consequences. “China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China’s regional environment,” says the 710-page report, officially published late last year but released for public sale only recently. Even so, China’s rising emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels, will begin to fall off only after about 2030, with big falls only after mid-century, says the report. Assuming no measures to counter global warming, grain output in the world’s most populous nation could fall from 5 to 20 percent by 2050, depending on whether a “fertilization effect” from more carbon dioxide in the air offsets losses, says the report. […] The report was written by teams of scientists supervised by government officials, and follows up on a first assessment released in 2007. It does not set policy, but offers a basis of evidence and forecasts that will shape policy. “Generally, the observed impacts of climate change on agriculture have been both positive and negative, but mainly negative,” Lin Erda, one of the chief authors of the report, told Reuters. “But steadily, as the temperatures continue to rise, the negative consequences will be increasingly serious,” said Lin, an expert on climate change and farming at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. “For a certain length of time, people will be able to adapt, but costs of adaptation will rise, including for agriculture.” […] “Climate change will lead to severe imbalances in China’s water resources within each year and across the years. In most areas, precipitation will be increasingly concentrated in the summer and autumn rainy seasons, and floods and droughts will become increasingly frequent,” says the report. […] “Since the 1950s, over 82 percent of glaciers have been in a state of retreat, and the pace has accelerated since the 1990s,” the report says of China’s glaciers in Tibet and nearby areas that feed major rivers. In low-lying coastal regions, rising seas will press up against big cities and export zones that have stood at the forefront of China’s industrialization. In the 30 years up to 2009, the sea level off Shanghai rose 11.5 centimeters (4.5 inches); in the next 30 years, it will probably rise another 10 to 15 centimeters. […] “Future climate warming will therefore increase the costs of agriculture,” says the report. […]
