Climate change is taking an increasing toll in China. Natural disasters caused some $49 billion worth of economic losses during 2023, according to the country’s emergency management ministry, up by 44 percent from 2022. An earthquake in Gansu province in December, which caused 151 deaths and a further 23,000 displaced from their homes, rounded out a dismal year.
The events at Zhengzhou became a cautionary tale for cities all around China, and nobody wants to find themselves in that situation ever again.
Yifei Li, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University (NYU) Shanghai
“Given the scale of the change and the across-the-board increase in adverse weather experiences all over China, there is a good amount of confidence to say that this is a manifestation of the climate crisis in China,” says Yifei Li, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University (NYU) Shanghai.
Awareness around flood preparations was heightened after 398 people were killed or left unaccounted for when flooding struck Zhengzhou, Henan province, in July 2021. Provincial authorities were found to have deliberately underreported the number of fatalities, according to a January 2022 central government report on the disaster.
“The events at Zhengzhou became a cautionary tale for cities all around China, and nobody wants to find themselves in that situation ever again,” says Li.
Despite efforts to learn from the Zhengzhou disaster, Beijing remains reluctant to refer to climate change as a crisis in its domestic messaging, Li says, preferring to use less alarming phrases.
“They seem to worry that just by calling it the climate crisis, it could be a source of social instability or give rise to social unrest,” says Li. “If they genuinely want to be a global leader in sustainability, they’ll have to be honest about what’s happening.”
Read the map below to learn more about the most serious extreme weather events that occurred in China in 2023. Click on the numbers on the map to read more about each event:
Design: Hiram Henriquez
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Aaron Mc Nicholas is a staff writer at The Wire based in Washington DC. He was previously based in Hong Kong, where he worked at Bloomberg and at Storyful, a news agency dedicated to verifying newsworthy social media content. He earned a Master of Arts in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Dublin City University in Ireland.
