Climate change hurts China’s poor

When the rains came two years ago, mudslides completely buried the E Mu’s home in China’s Sichuan province. They lost everything. 

The family of seven – two parents and five children – had no choice but to trek out of the mountains and set up home in Zhang You Fang village, where they now grow rice on a tiny plot of land of about 4 Mu (0.7 acres).

They have virtually no savings, so all the food they grow has to support their entire family, as well as pay the rent for their new home and land. 

"If we don't farm well, we don't have enough to eat," the eldest son told Greenpeace. "We want to go to school, but we don't have any money."    

Climate Change strikes China’s poor

China has been struggling for decades to help people out of poverty. But now there is a new hurdle to helping the country’s desperately poor – climate change.

A new report by Greenpeace China and Oxfam Hong Kong has found that climate change is hitting China’s poor the hardest

Climate change is causing extreme weather to occur more frequently and more intensely. The people who suffer the most from these natural disasters are the people least able to cope – China’s poor.

Just like the E Mu family. Their home was completely destroyed by flood-induced mudslides, the kinds of floods that climate scientists say can now be definitively linked to climate change.

Climate change will worsen China’s poverty

Climate change is destroying homes, crops, buildings, roads and hurting people’s livelihoods. It is causing drought, pest outbreaks and can make it more likely for disease to spread. Climate change is making it more and more difficult for China’s poor to climb out of poverty and causing some people to sink back into poverty.

And because China’s poor have such few resources, they are struggling both to cope and to recover from the damage inflicted by climate change.

Climate change, says the report, is going to make poverty much worse in China and will make it much more difficult for China to alleviate poverty.  

China needs to take climate change action

Greenpeace China is urging China to make climate change a top priority and take a leadership role at key United Nations climate change negotiations at Copenhagen in December.

While developing countries should not be expected to make greenhouse gas cuts, they should start to take action to limit their growth. China and other developing countries need to reduce their projected emissions growth by 15-30% by 2020.

On helping China’s poor, the report recommends that the government rework its poverty alleviation policy by taking the affects of climate change into account. Such action might include helping poverty stricken areas better able to deal with climate-related natural disasters and to put climate change policy at the top of their agenda when considering poverty.

Everyone’s talking about climate change, but China’s poor are already struggling to survive because of global warming.

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