Report Launch | Better to Put Down Firm Roots in the Countryside Than to Pale at “Climate”
Foodthink Says
Over the past two decades, social organisations have accumulated rich experience in poverty alleviation, development, rural revitalisation, ecological agriculture, disaster prevention, energy transition, care for vulnerable groups and gender equality—experience that is now vital for rural responses to climate change. But it is not just the climate that is changing; the countryside itself is transforming. Large-scale and rapid urbanisation, coupled with the industrialisation of agriculture, has profoundly reshaped rural landscapes and demographics. As smallholder farmers are increasingly marginalised by both policy and the market, receiving ever less from the land, their shift from farmers to migrant workers becomes an inevitable, if reluctant, outcome. And it is hardly surprising that the “389961” left-behind population of women, children and elderly in rural areas has become the most vulnerable link in the face of climate risk.
Only by understanding the transformations of rural China can we clarify the underlying logic of climate work. So how do social organisations define problems—and take action—when they enter the intersection of rural development and climate change? What successes and failures have they encountered, and what lessons have emerged? To address these questions, with support from Oxfam Hong Kong’s Beijing office, Foodthink spent the past year interviewing 29 social organisations, 11 scholars and public-interest practitioners, and drawing on 58 valid survey responses (from organisations already working on, or planning, climate initiatives in rural areas) to complete Research on Action Pathways for Rural Social Organisations Responding to Climate Change (click “Read the original” to download). At a recent report launch in Beijing, Foodthink invited social organisations, foundation practitioners, scholars and journalists to discuss: what are the most effective ways for social organisations to build climate resilience in rural areas? And how should we understand and address the “out-of-sync” tension between climate funding and community action, or between policy and practice?
I. Frost Upon Snow: When Climate Change Hits the Countryside
This is one example from the report. Its lead author, Kong Lingyu, sought to explain the primary dilemma that social organisations face when running climate change projects in rural areas—more and more organisations are arriving in the countryside with climate philanthropy funding, only to find that the root of the problem lies not in climate change, but in long-standing local issues of livelihoods, infrastructure, healthcare and ageing.
During the commentary session, Wang Xiaoyi, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, voiced the same perplexity: would a village take climate change into account when deciding whether to build water infrastructure or dig ponds? “Probably not at all,” he said. Whether farmers stay in the countryside, whether they still cherish the land, whether the government invests—these matter far more to such decisions.
Another commentator, Huang Yajun, is from the Shenggeng Social Work Service Centre in Conghua District, Guangzhou (hereafter “Shenggeng”). Shenggeng has been rooted in the mountains of Conghua for ten years, witnessing the transformation of the countryside firsthand: local industries have vanished, populations have poured out en masse, and the centre must now grapple with ageing. After Shenggeng had been running climate change projects for more than four years, Huang felt the report had struck at the real issues faced on the ground: “Take the past two years, for instance—everyone rushed to do climate risk assessments as if chasing a passing fad, but once the assessment is done, what happens next?”
This, too, is the first question that arises when social organisations bring the climate agenda into rural areas: when climate change is intertwined with the countryside’s entrenched structural problems, where should one look for “solutions”? And the reason this becomes a problem is, in large part, the constraints that climate philanthropy funding places on how problems are framed.
Lu Dequan, an expert at the Yunnan Lianxin Community Care Service Centre, is a veteran public-interest practitioner who was among the first to push domestic social organisations to engage with climate change work. In 2005, he left his teaching post at Hong Kong Baptist University to join Oxfam Hong Kong in establishing a research and development centre in Beijing, where he helped fund domestic grassroots social organisations to collaborate with international organisations on the “Climate Change and China’s Civil Society Positions/Actions” series reports (2007–2010). Even then, these reports keenly identified the complex relationship between climate change and inequality of development rights. Yet even now, Lu Dequan laments, there is still far too little research on climate justice: how to help smallholder farmers develop diversified livelihoods, how to prepare for disasters, and which groups face greater risk and pressure from climate change?
II. Mitigation or Adaptation?
Climate philanthropy funding typically begins in the field of mitigation—that is, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow the pace of climate change. For instance, as the methane emission reduction agenda has gained momentum, some social organisations working in rural areas have seized the opportunity to launch projects such as climate-friendly rice. (Editor’s note: this works by controlling water drainage and irrigation in rice paddies to shorten the time plants are submerged, thereby reducing anaerobic fermentation and, in turn, methane emissions.)
In the research for this report, Foodthink also found that social organisations working in rural areas had commonly grappled with the question of priorities between mitigation and adaptation. First, they faced specific technical challenges in carbon accounting. Among the social organisations interviewed by Foodthink, as many as 72.5% (42 organisations) reported that they were unclear about, or had not undertaken, project-level emission reduction accounting. In the interviews, only the Yunnan Sili Ecological Alternative Technology Centre (“Sili”) and Shenggeng had attempted such accounting, but both had encountered setbacks: Shenggeng had been pursuing mitigation since 2021 through a reduction in pesticide and fertiliser use, but the technical expert’s calculation table required nitrogen fertiliser usage data, whereas villagers used organic fertiliser, which could not be converted; pesticide data was also impossible to collect. Moreover, carbon accounting was not well suited to the smallholder farming context of diverse cropping.
Yet funders who prioritise mitigation action expect social organisations to provide carbon emission data to demonstrate project effectiveness. Beyond the methodological barriers, the villages where social organisations work are often relatively poor. What is the point of asking such villages to reduce their “subsistence emissions”? Does it not become a disguised form of “robbing the poor to feed the rich”?’ Kong Lingyu asked.
Sili, having tried the path of emission reduction accounting, concluded that an ‘adaptation-first, with emission reduction co-benefits’ approach was the best choice. With drought in Yunnan steadily intensifying, even without invoking methane emission reduction, farmers themselves wanted to grow water-saving drought-tolerant rice—because there simply was no water left. Climate change had, paradoxically, opened up a market for the Sili Centre’s once-struggling mitigation project: climate-friendly rice cultivation.
At the policy level, China itself has moved from emphasising mitigation to giving equal weight to mitigation and adaptation. Xu Yinlong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Climate Change Adaptation at the United Nations Environment Programme, recalled during his commentary on the report that the 2017 National Climate Change Programme of China had already stated that climate mitigation and climate adaptation should be given “equal emphasis”. By 2022, when China released its National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035, Xu recalled, experts again made a resounding call: adaptation must be strengthened—it matters more than mitigation.
Moreover, Xu Yinlong noted, climate adaptation also implies a workload several or even tens of times that of mitigation. Rural climate adaptation work requires “enduring, sustained commitment”.
III. Foundations Are Also Charting a Path for Rural Climate Responses
In a roundtable discussion titled “Are social organisations and funders in sync?”, Liu Yiwei from the Xianfeng Foundation recounted her team’s process of surveying rural issues. She spoke of how difficult it had been to find a starting point for rural work: after six months, they still needed more time to “get a clearer picture”. Rural work encompasses village infrastructure, rural–urban migration, employment and more—so many threads of social change closely tied to policy and reality that they had to be carefully unpicked. This was why, even after six months of research, the team had not rushed into funding decisions, and often felt a sense of disconnect as the upper and lower levels ended up “talking past each other”.
The Zhengrong Public Welfare Foundation in Fujian, focused on rural and community well-being, has also begun to engage with climate issues in recent years. Programme officer Liu Yiyue explained that when choosing partners, the first considerations are whether what the partner does is grounded in a real social problem and whether the organisation has been deeply rooted in that work over the long term; they also assess the partner’s influence locally and among peers working on the same issues nationally.
Xiao Kaiteng, an adviser at the Ginkgo Foundation, noted that Ginkgo’s climate-related funding began in 2023 and has now continued for three years, with projects in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fisheries accounting for 30%. She explained the foundation’s interest in climate issues: “Ginkgo is not a climate-specific funder, but we see the sensitivity of our partner organisations to social issues and their need to experiment. We want to offer companionship and absorb the cost of trial and error. The complexity of climate problems dovetails perfectly with the diversity of our partners—it is where we intend to focus our efforts going forward.” Xiao Kaiteng believes that for individual organisations, the priority should be shifting from ‘climate+’ to “me+climate”—asking oneself what ‘I’ is. Engaging with climate issues does not mean switching one’s lane; rather, it means incorporating the impact of climate change on the people one serves into one’s work.
Oxfam has been paying attention to climate change in China since around 2007, and its poverty alleviation and rural development programme in the country has a history of over 20 years. Hu Wei, a programme officer at Oxfam Hong Kong’s Beijing office, said this was partly because, in their rural work, they had naturally found the impact of climate growing ever more pronounced. On the other hand, as early as the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference, Oxfam had put forward an initiative to combat climate poverty and promote climate justice, calling for greater attention to the impact of climate change on vulnerable nations and communities. Guided by the principle of justice, Oxfam’s work follows two main strategies: first, helping vulnerable communities reduce the threats posed by climate change and building resilience in rural communities. In China, Oxfam advocates a farmer-centred approach to rural development—for example, since 2019 it has supported local communities in Wangjinzhuang, Shexian, Hebei Province to establish self-organised rural groups, conserving local traditional varieties within the dryland terrace system while cultivating new drought-resistant adaptive varieties. The second strategy is to monitor the delivery of climate loss and damage funding, advocate for developed countries to fulfil their climate finance commitments, and track the implementation of climate adaptation finance in Asia.
Faced with the reality that most funders prioritise climate mitigation over climate adaptation, a participant who works at an international foundation noted that international foundations do support adaptation work, but in China their current focus remains largely on policy advocacy for mitigation. In this context, service-delivery climate adaptation work is not their priority. Meanwhile, domestic foundations have mostly yet to formulate long-term strategies for responding to climate change, let alone cross-sector collaboration between “ecosystems” such as integrating climate change into rural development strategies. This explains why front-line social organisations find it so difficult to be on the same wavelength as funders.
She also pointed out that whether funders and social organisations are “in sync” or “out of sync” can only be discussed when there is actually a “frequency” to begin with—this requires funders to have a real understanding of rural development in the context of climate change and a long-term strategic plan; only then can the question of being “in sync” even arise.
He Jinhao from the Walking with Nature Foundation felt, however, that being out of sync between funders and social organisations could be equally important. “Being in sync can lead to assimilation—organisations may lose their unique way of understanding a problem.”
IV. Overtaking on the “Last Mile” in the Countryside
Yet the question of how to provide for elderly people in the countryside is precisely what Chen Jingjing, a researcher specialising in the Three Rural Issues (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers), has focused on particularly over the past few years.
Chen Jingjing firmly believes that social organisations’ work should serve people’s concrete lives, not debates about issues, and that modernisation should never be treated as an end in itself. Whether one speaks of modernising agriculture and rural areas, rural revitalisation, or climate change, the same question must be answered: During these decades seen as a transitional period, what kind of life should—and can—people in the countryside, and those who have left to scrape a living elsewhere, actually have?
The pastoral areas are likewise caught up in the processes of urbanisation and rural hollowing. Under the combined pressures of climate change, livestock-industry development, property-rights systems and grassland policy, Shi Xiangying, Executive Director of the Shan Shui Conservation Center, found that when faced with a complex problem like grassland degradation in pastoral areas, simply mobilising and persuading herders to reduce grazing feels inadequate. In such cases, the positioning of government and community matters enormously—are they to rely mainly on fiscal transfer payments to drive ecological protection, or to safeguard livelihoods by developing livestock and tourism? Meanwhile, traditional pastoral culture is also being lost, and social organisations, too, must start from a community-centred perspective to think about how to intervene.
Zuo Zhi, Director of the Yunnan Sili Ecological Alternative Technology Centre, strongly concurred: “The deeper you go into the grassroots, the more you should focus on foundational issues.” They have maintained close cooperation with the county and township agricultural technology service centres throughout. As the frontline of the agricultural extension system, what these centres care about are often concrete issues tied directly to farmers’ needs: how to protect rice yields in abnormal weather? How to respond to a pest and disease outbreak? And how to ensure through effective training that the organic fertiliser, biopesticides and ripening agents distributed by the government are used correctly and efficiently by farmers—”these are precisely the areas where social organisations can actively participate and make a difference.”
Zuo Zhi drew a distinction between policy-making departments and policy-implementation bodies. Municipal and county-level Agricultural Technology Extension Stations and township agricultural technology centres largely play the latter role and can sit down with social organisations to discuss implementation. “They—the agricultural extension services—are in fact making their own efforts under limited resources.”
Chen Jingjing noted that in recent years, central government investment in the Three Rural Issues (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers) has reached the scale of RMB 1.5–1.7 trillion, with programmes spanning a vast array of sectors and stakeholders. Take a high-standard basic farmland project, for example: getting five or six out of every ten yuan actually into the village is already considered a fairly good outcome.
Xiao Yunsheng, director of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, also found that the application process for agricultural-sector project funding is far from user-friendly for smallholder farmers. One ecological farming enthusiast from Yunnan enthusiastically applied for a RMB 30,000 subsidy, only to find that printing costs, trips between government offices and other administrative expenses had nearly consumed the entire grant. The government is more inclined to support larger-scale farmers.
Village and township documentary director and Bilibili content creator “遇真纪事” felt the bias in subsidies during field visits: “The more you plant, the more you receive.” Smallholders typically receive around RMB 100 per mu per year in rice-growing subsidies, yet local media reports and villagers’ accounts suggest that subsidies for large-scale growers or agricultural companies can reach RMB 200–300 per mu*. With such subsidy incentives, some growers dispense entirely with seedling raising, opting for direct seeding instead, thereby saving the cost and the roughly thirty-day seedling-raising period needed for transplanting.
In pastoral areas, Shi Xiangying has also encountered numerous artificial grass-planting subsidy projects aimed at combating grassland degradation and sandstorms. These projects are mostly outsourced through competitive bidding to third-party companies. Sometimes, grass is planted, dies within a year, and can be replanted—another round of subsidies follows. She observed that from the government’s perspective, the more pressing question is how to spend such a vast sum of money efficiently. In such circumstances, holding one-on-one conversations with hundreds of farming households is simply impractical. But social organisations can fill precisely this gap, drawing community residents in and fostering cooperation among village collectives, grassland stations and Agricultural Technology Extension Stations. Shi Xiangying sees this as a meaningful form of social-organisation participation in rural grassroots governance—completing the “last mile”.
Huang Yajun likewise believes that, despite the many quandaries, the climate change agenda may offer social organisations a chance to rediscover their value. Starting from climate change, organisations can choose to work “narrow”—tackling specific disasters and risks—or, as she insists, they can and should choose to work “broad” and holistic, stitching together the chains of grassroots governance, community mobilisation and industry development. Shenggeng, for instance, provides elderly care in Conghua, Guangdong, which has earned recognition and respect from the local civil affairs system, opening the door to potential collaboration with the township’s Three-Prevention Office on climate change matters.
From Li Dajun’s perspective—Industry Support Project Director at the Beijing Heyi Green Public Welfare Foundation—a comprehensive or holistic outlook is precisely the advantage of China’s rural social organisations over those in other public-interest niches, because they are not “suspended above reality”: their staff and working methods are rooted in the land, and they possess strong systems thinking. This is what enables them to address concrete problems more effectively.
Grounded in rural realities while retaining a macro perspective that encompasses climate change and beyond, this ability to bridge the local and the broader is the foundation for the sustained growth of social organisations. Foodthink’s founding editor Chang Tianle used the metaphor of “overtaking on the bend”—Chinese civil society organisations once raised many forward-looking voices on issues such as environmental protection, food and agriculture, and women’s rights, only to be smoothed over over the past decade and more. Today, could the climate change agenda present a new opportunity—both for our renewed understanding of rural development and for social organisations to lead the public agenda?
**While dry direct-seeding is indeed a climate-friendly rice cultivation method that reduces methane emissions and conserves water, the speaker’s point here was about the lack of care shown by conventional agricultural producers in their cultivation practices.
Edited by: Lingyu