Natural disasters such as flooding, drought and extreme temperatures cost China 93.16 billion yuan ($12.83bn) in the first half of this year, with almost 33 million people affected, the government said yesterday.
Heavy snow, 22 strong earthquakes including one of 7.1 magnitude in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, landslides and mudslides in southwestern regions and flooding on the Yellow River and in southern provinces all added to the burden.
The 32.38m people affected included 322 who died or disappeared, the ministry told a news briefing. About 856,000 people faced emergency resettlement, 23,000 houses were destroyed, and around 3.17m hectares of crops damaged.
The number of people impacted compares with just 48.76m people for the whole of 2023, when 95 people died or went missing, according to the ministry’s report from last year.
The impact on the economy in January-June this year was also worse than the year-earlier period, when the country logged 38.23bn yuan worth of loss. It was the biggest first-half disaster-related loss since 2019, according to data available on the Emergency Management Ministry website.
China has seen larger swings in temperature breaking historical records in recent years while precipitation – rain or snow – has grown more erratic, signs that point to the impact of climate change on the country’s weather.
Funds channelled into disaster management have reached 4.17bn yuan so far this year, according to a Reuters tally, with 546m yuan allocated last month for agricultural production and disaster relief.
Long durations of icy weather and intense snow in the winter months severely disrupted people and their livelihoods, ministry spokesperson Shen Zhanli said.
Parts of southern China such as the Guangxi region, Guangdong and Fujian provinces were hit hard by frequent and extreme rains as the annual rainy season began earlier than usual. Dozens have died from floods or rain-induced landslides.
Around the same time, droughts developed quite quickly and covered large areas in the north and around the North China Plain, impacting local agricultural production. At the peak, some 6.2m hectares of farmland faced moisture shortages compared with the average 2.67m hectares in other years.
But losses were capped as many of the affected areas had better irrigation and water storage systems, the ministry said.
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