Climate change hitting poor Chinese

CLIMATE CHANGE in the world’s most populous nation is making some of the poorest people in China even more impoverished and could undermine the country’s strong economic growth of recent years, a report issued yesterday has shown.

The Chinese government should review its existing poverty alleviation policy to take climate change into account, activist groups Oxfam and Greenpeace said in a report compiled with experts from China’s Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

“Eradicating climate poverty is the most complex and most difficult feat to accomplish,” Hu An’gang, an economist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, wrote in a preface to the report. He also pointed out that China is one of the countries in the world most prone to natural disasters caused by climate change, with over 70 per cent of Chinese cities and over 50 per cent of the population located in areas susceptible to serious meteorological, seismic or oceanic disasters.

The proportion of the absolute poverty population that is affected by climate change reached 95 per cent in 2005, and is expected to rise. Case studies from Guangdong, Sichuan and Gansu provinces show that global warming induces floods, snow storms, and landslides which are detrimental to ecologically sensitive areas and hamper poverty relief efforts.

“China’s poverty alleviation efforts for the past few decades could be seriously undermined unless the Chinese government takes the leadership in shaping an aggressive climate rescue treaty in the Copenhagen climate meeting this December,” Greenpeace China climate campaigner Li Yan said in a statement.

The report said there was a correlation between poverty and a weak environment – 95 per cent of those living in absolute poverty in China are living in ecologically fragile areas. “Climate change is making poverty alleviation work harder . . . because as soon as there is a disaster in those places where the environment is very fragile, these return to poverty,” the academy’s Xu Yinlong said.