COP28 Opens — Urgent Need to Build Agricultural Climate Resilience | Roundtable Recap

For farmers, it means the farming calendar has become increasingly difficult to follow. Scholarly research reveals that, amid rural hollowing, farmers confronted with climate disasters such as droughts and floods often respond by reducing their acreage, simply because there is not enough labour. Moreover, although a comprehensive disaster relief system has been established across China’s rural areas, it still falls short when faced with record-breaking extreme weather. Climate change is making the most vulnerable groups—left-behind elderly, children, women and low-income residents in the villages—only more exposed.

What challenges will these shifts pose for food security and rural development? In a future of ever more frequent extreme weather, how do we safeguard our rice bowls and our homes?

At the international climate negotiation table, food and agriculture are shifting from the margins toward the centre. This is because food systems account for nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and in recent years events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine war and extreme weather across the globe have deepened the world’s food crisis. These signals compel us to reflect: what kind of food and agricultural systems are truly safe and resilient?

In September this year, Foodthink partnered with Tencent News’ “Let’s Chat Science” programme to invite Wei Ke, a meteorologist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Liu Juan, associate professor of political ecology at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University; and Liu Jie, associate professor at the International Business School, Shaanxi Normal University, to explore a shared question: how should farmers respond in this era of ever more frequent extreme weather? What climate adaptation strategies and disaster prevention and relief mechanisms do rural areas need so that people can be shielded from the compounded survival risks posed by successive climate disasters?

Roundtable Guests

Wei Ke

Meteorologist, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

I. The Tropics Are Expanding Toward the Poles

Second, could the warming and humidification in the north represent a long-term trend? There is a degree of scientific basis for this view, as global warming has driven the tropics to expand toward the poles. According to observational data from several circulation indices, over the past few decades the tropical belt in the Northern Hemisphere has shifted roughly 1° northward, equivalent to about 100 kilometres. This shift is modest in scale but undeniably a clear change, meaning that regions in the north that were once relatively arid may, as conditions expand northward, gradually become wetter.

So assessing dry–wet changes in northern China likely involves two dimensions: one is the long-term trend, the other is interdecadal variation. In my view, climate change in the north reflects the interplay of these two dimensions.

Against the backdrop of global warming, as temperatures in northern China climb ever higher, the weather response is that “the dry get drier and the wet get wetter”. Higher temperatures mean the atmosphere can hold more moisture, so when rain does fall, the extra moisture makes it far more intense. Equally, because the air can accommodate more water vapour, rainfall becomes harder to achieve during dry seasons. The result is that precipitation in the arid regions of the north is very likely to become even sparser, particularly during dry seasons.

II. The Farming Calendar Is Harder to Follow

The second observation, which resonated deeply across all the regions we studied, is that farmers once had a solid command of the rhythms of the solar terms and the farming calendar, but there is now far more uncertainty, and the farming calendar has become increasingly difficult to follow. Of course, this is not solely due to natural climate factors; it is also linked to labour migration, land transfer, and shifts in cropping structure. In parts of southern China, for instance, farmers previously grew double-cropping rice and had a fine feel for the timing of each task. But now, with the climate itself harder to predict and some left-behind elderly farmers staggering their planting schedules to cope with labour shortages, the rhythm of farmwork has been visibly disrupted.

In the past, when facing floods or droughts, farmers would take proactive remedial steps such as drainage or irrigation. But today, collective action is often impossible to mobilise, and many smallholders, short of labour, tend to resort to avoidance strategies — reducing their planting area, cutting the variety of crops they grow, switching from double-cropping to a single rice crop. This is how many small-scale farmers are coping in practice.

It is also worth noting the widespread insensitivity to climate that comes with leaving agriculture behind. I feel this personally. Last year, it was not until near the end of the year that I finally had the chance to visit rural areas in the south, and when I arrived I found ponds cracked dry down to the bottom, with entire harvests of late-season rice lost — a truly harrowing sight. It was only there that I learned the region had been suffering a drought of six months or longer; in fact, across the entire Yangtze River basin, and especially its middle and lower reaches, 2022 saw drought conditions that were remarkably widespread.

Ordinary people in cities are generally less sensitive to climate change, particularly its impact on agriculture, rural areas and farmers. Partly this reflects biases in media coverage, but much of it stems from the fact that urban dwellers’ relationship with the land and natural climate is far less direct than that of people living in the countryside. Within rural communities, too, perceptions diverge. Whether people leave to work in factories, pursue education, or settle in towns, once they step away from the land, their livelihoods no longer depend on farming, and their direct connection to climate weakens. Or, put differently, once they are off the land, their exposure to climate risk diminishes. When a small farmer toils over a few acres of land for a whole year and gets no harvest, that year’s labour is wasted. But a migrant worker in the city can find many other ways to earn back those few thousand yuan. Their psychological experience of climate change is entirely different. It is the substitutability of livelihoods and the environment in which one now lives that creates differential distances from climate risk between people.

III. Water-Saving Irrigation Is Great — So Why Aren’t Farmers Adopting It?

IV. Who Bears the Cost of Climate Adaptation?

The second scenario involves a model of shared responsibility between government and farmers, such as policy-based agricultural insurance. There are currently two main forms: centrally subsidised policy-based agricultural insurance and locally subsidised policy-based agricultural insurance. Centrally subsidised policy-based agricultural insurance covers primarily crop farming for staple crops and livestock, with insurance premiums borne mainly by central, municipal and district-level governments; individual farmers typically cover around 20 to 30 per cent. Locally subsidised policy-based agricultural insurance, as a complement to centrally subsidised cover, has a somewhat broader scope of coverage, with part of the premiums also borne by local government. This offers smallholders one means of offsetting losses from natural agricultural disasters.

The third scenario involves projects such as the construction of farmland water infrastructure, which require high investment and are typically carried out at a larger scale. In these cases, the costs are borne primarily by the government.

V. Can Insurance Really Ease Farmers’ Worries?

Moreover, when we speak of losses from climate change, direct losses — such as crops destroyed or infrastructure damaged — are relatively straightforward to assess. But indirect impacts, such as damage to natural ecosystems or the loss of cultural assets, are far harder to quantify. These are all issues for which no clear answer exists at the global level either. Returning to the question of who bears the losses that smallholders suffer from climate change: Dr Liu Jie mentioned insurance a moment ago. According to relevant research and statistics, more than 200 types of agricultural commodities are currently eligible for government-subsidised insurance, which is a fairly broad range. Yet in our fieldwork we have also found considerable scepticism among farmers about these schemes — the payment of insurance premiums, the scope of coverage, the assessment of losses, the level of payouts: there are many ambiguities. Plenty of farmers pay their premiums but, when disaster strikes, find it very difficult to actually receive the compensation they expected.

There is another immediate problem: smallholders’ incomes have always been low, and in that context, the insurance premium itself further raises the cost of agricultural production, so willingness to enrol is understandably limited. When the losses brought by climate change intensify, smallholders are far more likely to reduce their planting or even resort to farmland abandonment than to purchase insurance. And as smallholders gradually withdraw from agricultural production, there is a real risk that our food security will be undermined.

So, to truly address the interplay between climate disasters, agricultural production and compensation, we may need a holistic research approach and a systematic policy framework — one that effectively links macro-level policy with grassroots governance.