Forecaster in climate change warning
Print Edition
Climate change threatens some of China’s most important infrastructure projects, a top meteorologist said yesterday, adding that the country’s rate of warming was higher than the global average.
Zheng Guoguang, head of China’s Meteorological Administration, told weekly newspaper the Study Times that a recent increase in weather disasters such as floods, typhoons, droughts and heatwaves had a “big connection” to climate change.
Such catastrophes were a threat to schemes such as the Three Gorges Dam and a high-altitude railway to Tibet, he said. “Against the backdrop of the global warming, the risks faced by our large engineering projects have increased,” Zheng told the newspaper.
“Global warming affects the safety and stability of these big projects, as well as their operations and economic effectiveness, technological standards and engineering methods,” he said.
China’s rate of warming was “at an obviously higher rate” than the global average, Zheng said. “The first decade of this century was the hottest in the past 100 years.”
Dealing with climate change was necessary for China to put its economy on a more sustainable growth path, Zheng said. “Climate change is a lever which can push our country’s economic transformation.”
Coal accounts for about 60 percent of China’s CO2 emissions, which are causing massive health problems because of the smog they generate.
China, the world’s biggest emitter of climate-changing greenhouse gases, has sought to shift increasingly to cleaner burning hydrocarbons such as natural gas and to renewable energy.
Last year, China said it would aim to peak its fast-rising emissions by 2030.
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