The Chinese mainland traverses diverse ecosystems, all vulnerable
to climate change. (International Rivers / Reuters)|
Key Points
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It's often said that China's rise will present one of the world's greatest security challenges this century.While China has promised the world a peaceful rise, its "wolf warrior diplomacy", fast-growing military, and territorial claim to most of the South China Sea despite having no legal basis, suggest otherwise.
But there's another, less understood consequence of China's rise — and that's to do with the enormous scale of its emissions.
Richard Smith, an author and US-based expert in Chinese history and economics, said China's rising emissions — constituting nearly a third of the global total — poses "the single biggest threat to life on Earth".
"What's uniquely dangerous about the Chinese case is that its emissions are … growing so fast that scientists tell us they could eventually doom the climate on their own regardless of what the rest of the world does," Mr Smith wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.
"In the most optimistic Chinese Government scenario, coal and other fossil fuels will still provide at least two-thirds of China's electricity until as late as 2050, by which time it will be too late to matter."
China recently pledged to be carbon neutral by 2060, but the country's sheer scale makes this very difficult.
China is the world's largest emitter of CO2 — one of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming — and it is also the world's largest consumer and investor in renewable energy.
However, its renewables capacity is nowhere near the levels that could allow China to wean off fossil fuels and meet its economic growth targets in the short term.
Experts have said that global warming would have profound effects on global security, as fluctuating weather patterns and increasingly scarce resources could exacerbate geopolitical tensions.
For China, environmental issues could also have profound impacts on the stability of the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian rule — and it's something Beijing is abundantly aware of.
"There's an assumption from a lot of people that China doesn't understand that its pollution is a problem, where I think actually, Chinese leaders are much more up-to-date and aware of all the issues surrounding climate change than most Western leaders," Jonna Nyman, an expert in international energy and climate politics at the UK's University of Sheffield, told the ABC.
"The issue is the scale of the problem they're actually facing, which is gargantuan.
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Sediment-laden floodwaters gush through the Xiaolangdi Dam on the
Yellow River in Luoyang, Henan province.(Reuters) |
Pichamon Yeophantong, a political scientist and China expert at UNSW Canberra, told the ABC that environmental threats act as a "threat multiplier" on existing tensions such as China's urban-rural divide, rather than being the source of conflict.
Mr Smith said environmental stress could add further tension in regions where Beijing is sometimes viewed with suspicion, including Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia.
"In Tibet, locals have long resisted 'modernisation' efforts by China — Chinese efforts to introduce rice farming, their suppression of yak herding and forced urbanisation of Tibetan herders, the urbanised destruction of the countryside around Lhasa, the trans-Tibet railroad to China," Mr Smith said.
"In Xinjiang, Chinese resource extraction, the mines, oil drilling, the coal-to-chemicals plants have made pollution in Xinjiang worse than in Beijing.
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Polluted water from a rare earths mine spews into a tailings dam
in Inner Mongolia. (Reuters: David Gray) |
A recent report estimated about 16,000 mosques have been destroyed in the region, which Beijing denies.
The impact of climate change on China's diverse ecosystem could also make social and economic divides even more pronounced.
For example, the vast North China Plain — a region with one of the highest population densities on Earth — may experience such severe extreme heat by the latter half of this century, it would render the region uninhabitable if emissions continued unabated.
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The North China Plain is home to one of the highest
concentrations of people on Earth.
(ABC News: Jarrod Fankhauser) |
In the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH), it's predicted that about a third of its glaciers will melt, even if the world keeps average temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. If temperatures rise by 2 degrees, two-thirds of it will melt, which could intensify flooding and disrupt agricultural seasons for billions downstream.
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The Hindu Kush Himalayas feed river basins used by almost 2
billion people.
(ABC News: Jarrod Fankhauser) |
Meanwhile, recent research by not-for-profit Climate Central suggested that sea-level rise will plunge China's coastal cities lower than tide levels by 2050 more than previously predicted, even if emissions are reduced moderately.
"[Data shows] China is a country with high vulnerability to climate change and is more vulnerable to climate change than the global average in many ways, including sea-level rise," Hongyu Guo, assistant director at Beijing's environmental advocacy body Greenovation Hub, told the ABC.
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| Water scarcity has led to dry farming beds along the Yongding River, south-west of Beijing. (ABC News: Brant Cumming) |
"According to the China Maritime Disaster Bulletin, China's coastal sea level has been rising at an accelerating pace in the past 40 years.
The threat from withinIn the short term, one of the most pressing issues for China is arguably water scarcity.
China is home to 20 per cent of the global population, but the country has access to only 7 per cent of the globe's fresh water, according to a 2018 report from China Dialogue, a non-profit organisation looking into China's environmental challenges.
About 80 per cent of the water it does have is concentrated in the south.
Meanwhile China's north, which has 64 per cent of China's farmland and more than 696 million people, suffers from acute water stress (where total water consumption — including agriculture, industrial and drinking water use — drops below 500 cubic metres per person, per year).
To ease this pressure, Beijing built the South-North canal, which transfers drinking water 1,500 kilometres from southern China to Beijing.
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When it was completed in 2018, the South-North canal was the most
expensive and biggest engineering project of its type.
(ABC News: Brant Cumming) |
However, the sheer volume of China's water consumption means infrastructure like the canal isn't the silver bullet to solve the country's water woes.
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'Great walls' of trees 
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China and Africa are busily planting millions of trees to
build "green walls" in a bid to keep deserts at bay. But will
it work? Read more
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In 2017, government statistics figures showed agriculture and industry — also concentrated in the north — consumed about 84 per cent of the country's water.
Meanwhile, the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers for agriculture has
polluted 70 per cent of China's water table, according to government
surveys.
Charles Parton, author of China Dialogue's 2018 report
and the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee Special Adviser on China,
concluded that water scarcity could present a grave threat to China's
stability.
"Clearly if a sudden water crisis were to hit, some very hard choices would be forced upon the Government between agriculture, power generation, industry and everyday use by the people," Mr Parton wrote.
"The threat is worse than just to food security, economic prosperity and social wellbeing: the likelihood of those and other factors leading to large-scale unrest is something which must terrify the [Chinese Communist] Party."
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China's damming of its reaches of the Mekong River has courted
significant controversy. (Flickr: International Rivers) |
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| Water scarcity has led to dry farming beds along the Yongding River, south-west of Beijing. (ABC News: Brant Cumming) |
Water has also been a contentious issue between China and countries downstream, including Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
To date, China has no formal water treaties with those countries.
In April this year, American environmental consultancy Eyes on Earth accused China of withholding water during a 2019 drought that devastated communities downstream.
The Mekong River Commission confirmed China withheld critical data from its Mekong water stations.
Dr Yeophantong said conflicts involving Asia's largest rivers, including the Mekong, could turn into "a catastrophe that has spill-over effects on other countries", as climate change is tipped to exacerbate floods and drier monsoon seasons, which could significantly disrupt livelihoods.
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| The Himalayan ranges on the Indian-Chinese border seen from space. (NASA Johnson) |
"You've got [conflicts between] India-China, India-Pakistan, and you've got Myanmar as well. So this is a conflict-prone region," Mr Molden said.
"If we can focus on science, if we can focus on the environment, we can create important [multilateral] discussion platforms where [countries] can work together."
Last week, the eight countries that make up the region — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Myanmar and Pakistan — signed a joint declaration at an ICIMOD-brokered summit to investigate the establishment of a HKH multilateral bloc.
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Dr Yeophantong said issues over the Mekong could prompt China to launch a similar initiative with its South-East Asian neighbours.
"But at the same time, both India and China are so focused on the military and security aspects they are neglecting the environmental dimension."
When announcing China's carbon neutrality pledge last month, President Xi Jinping told delegates at a virtual General Assembly meeting that "humankind can no longer afford to ignore the repeated warnings of nature".
President Xi Jinping's carbon neutral pledge at last month's UN General Assembly. (video)
While his statement could have been read as an environmental call-to-arms, the pledge can also provide China with an edge over the US in their strategic rivalry.
"I could see [the pledge] being a key trigger for worries among some Western states, because I think the US under Donald Trump has really left a massive power vacuum," Sheffield's Dr Nyman said.
"Things like this new pledge, alongside other Chinese leadership initiatives, have really stepped in to fill that gap."
But regardless of whether or not China wins in the geopolitical stakes, there's one battle Beijing ultimately needs to win.
"They just have to be confronted on this."
Links
- Re-evaluating China’s water crisis
- China's Mekong River dams are generating renewable energy, but are costing locals their livelihoods
- China's carbon neutral by 2060 pledge has wowed some, but where is the detail?
- China remains the world's worst polluter but did you know it's also a leader in renewable energy?
- Could climate change become a security issue — and threaten democracy?
- China could face deadly heat waves due to climate change
- Himalayas to lose one-third of glaciers by 2100 even if Paris climate goals are met
- China and Africa are building 'great walls' of trees to hold back the desert. But will it work?
- New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding
