International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction: Envisioning a More Resilient Agriculture

Today, 13 October 2024, marks the 35th International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. This day of observance, established by the United Nations, aims to raise international awareness of disaster prevention and mitigation.

Yet over the past year, increasingly abnormal natural disasters raging across the country have remained the greatest threat facing China’s farmers – the age-old reality of farming at the mercy of the elements continues unabated.

Since early summer, extreme weather has struck every corner of the country. In June, provinces across southern China were battered by sustained heavy rain and severe flooding; in the north, by contrast, temperatures soared while rain was scarce, with drought in Henan proving especially dire. Average precipitation there fell 71% below the long-term norm for the same period, leaving farmers in many areas unable to irrigate their fields, gripped with anxiety.

By July, the north was hit by another rapid whiplash from drought to flooding. Henan is the starkest example: in mid-July, record-breaking torrential rain submerged houses in many areas, cut off the power supply and left residents trapped. Crops that farmers had so painstakingly nursed back from drought were drowned overnight. Nationally, summer grain production saw a rare decline, falling 0.9% year-on-year. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs characterised the shortfall as a slight reduction, insisting that the year was still a good harvest.

Affected by successive heatwaves and heavy rainfall across China’s main vegetable-growing regions, vegetable prices kept climbing throughout the summer. Just as autumn arrived, Super Typhoon Yagi made landfall in Hainan in September, with total losses to the province’s agriculture, livestock and fisheries exceeding ten billion yuan. Typhoon Bebinca – the strongest to reach Shanghai in 75 years – flooded vegetable fields and damaged polytunnels across Shanghai, Jiangsu and other areas. Yangcheng Lake hairy crab farmers reported that their enclosure nets had been torn and crabs had escaped.

Then there are the heart-rending June 16 rainstorm in Meizhou, Guangdong; the breach of the Dongting Lake embankment at Huarong, Hunan; the record downpours in Huludao, Liaoning… meteorological disasters follow one another without respite, though they are by no means unique to this year. Rising global temperatures increase the atmosphere’s moisture capacity, making weather systems more volatile and extreme events such as torrential rain and typhoons more frequent.

At the start of this year, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record and forecast that average temperatures in 2024 could be higher still. Data show that since the 1980s, every decade has been hotter than the one before. Global average temperatures now stand approximately 1.45°C above pre-industrial levels (1850–1900), and they will continue to rise. This means that weather disasters – more frequent and more destructive with each passing year – have become the new normal that agriculture must face.

Seizing this opportunity, we have gathered Foodthink’s previously published climate articles so that readers may look back together on the climate disasters that have struck agriculture in recent years, and consider how to build a more resilient agricultural system.