Rising seas have eroded part of the coast in China’s southern Guangdong province, which has been a principal source of China’s economic growth in recent decades. Losses last year from ocean disasters in Guangdong are estimated to be more than $1-billion.
Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Rising seas have eroded part of the coast in China’s southern Guangdong province, which has been a principal source of China’s economic growth in recent decades. Losses last year from ocean disasters in Guangdong are estimated to be more than $1-billion.
Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
As rising water levels along the Guangdong coast threaten to create havoc in its economic heartland, China’s leadership is recognizing the country’s increasing vulnerability to climate change, Nathan VanderKlippe reports
Nathan VanderKlippe
GUANGZHOU, CHINA The Globe and Mail Last updated: Saturday, Dec. 05, 2015 10:34AM EST
At Pleasant Banyan Bay in China’s southern Guangdong province, couples flock by the dozens for elaborately staged wedding photos on the white sand. Large signs on a nearby hotel shout, “Forever.”
But the love on display here might outlast the sand. A rising sea has narrowed the main beach by 10 metres and scoured around trees, exposing their roots. Smaller beaches on the fringes of the bay have already vanished.
“I know the glaciers and the poles are melting and that’s why the water is rising,” said Chen Hong, 48, a lifeguard who has worked on this beach since 2000. Watching the water slowly creep upward has made him a pessimist.
“With the sea level rising so much, water is going to occupy a lot of land,” he said. “Earth may have given birth to humans. But it seems like, in the end, humans will destroy the Earth.”
Climate change Visiting a picture-perfect Chinese beach that is slowly being swallowed by the sea
2:08
No country on Earth has more people at risk from the sea-level rise than China, where 85 million people live on land that will either be flooded or at risk of inundation in the future, according to an analysis based on a six-metre sea-level rise published in Science this year.
A 900-page Chinese climate science report released recently points to sea levels as one of the chief risks to the country, saying some coastal “cities may even face risks of massive disasters that are hard to forecast.”
And Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, will experience greater losses than any other major global city, the World Bank has warned. The sprawling industrial complex now rooted in the region’s Pearl River Delta has been a principal source of China’s enormous new wealth in recent decades. But what has proved fertile land for development has also come laden with the risk of floods. Most of the delta lies within a metre of sea level. About 13 per cent lies below sea level – not far off the 26 per cent in the Netherlands.
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