China’s rural communities are adapting to climate change

The village of Xinshou in Zhaotong, Yunnan is close to the upper Yangtze River. But being nearly 670 metres up a hillside means water can be scarce, so most residents rely on wells and water tanks.

Hotter temperatures and drought often leave these tanks dry, making the elderly particularly vulnerable. Disputes over water usage can follow. The village committee handled over 40 cases in 2023.

“Previously, residents would collect water that ran off their fields,” says Yang Fang, a project officer with the charity Zhaotong Yongqing (meaning Zhaotong Forever Green) which supports vulnerable people in rural areas. She and her colleagues carried out field research on the impacts of higher temperatures and water shortages and designed a climate-adaptation programme to assist the villagers.

China is one of the countries worst affected by extreme weather events associated with climate change, and experienced more than half of the world’s disaster-related agricultural loss between 2008 and 2018.

As well as farmers and their livelihoods, the elderly, women and children are particularly vulnerable. But rural communities are finding ways to adapt to the situation, sometimes with the help of NGOs like Zhaotong Yongqing.

Yang Fang has been working with the charity for seven years and says its work only shifted towards climate adaptation in the last two. It was in the summer of 2022 that she realised she needed to understand climate change to really help the elderly.

That year, 19 villages they work with, including Xinshou, suffered several days of 40°C-plus temperatures. She received reports from village volunteers about elderly folk getting no nighttime respite from the heat, and struggling to cope. Several elderly people died in Xinshou due to the heat.

Yang Feng attended workshops run by Shen Dingfang, who we will meet later. She learned how to assess climate risks in rural areas using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. The method had been adapted from a solely quantitative one used by the UN climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Rural climate adaptation

Zheng Yan is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Research Institute for Eco-civilisation, and one of the authors of the 2035 National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy.

She tells Dialogue Earth that while China has top-level policy like that strategy in place, NGOs will need to mobilise to respond to actual circumstances on the ground: “An important first step is a clear definition of the risks and impacts climate change has for communities,” she says.

Meanwhile, China’s rural communities have already quietly started adapting to climate change. With help from the Zhaotong Yongqing team, the villagers of Xinshou have formed a 30-person committee to oversee village water use. The committee identified 12 households with particular shortages and provided them with water tanks and barrels. It raised funds to repair the village’s existing tanks and helped neighbours work together to successfully find new sources of water on the hillside.

There have been no more arguments over water, says Yang Fang. Her team has also run courses for the villagers on the links between climate change, health and agriculture. Older residents can now explain how climate change affects health and give short presentations on keeping fruit trees watered and free of pests during heatwaves.

“The climate crisis has bought the villagers closer together,” says Yang Fang. Whereas previously conflicts tended to arise due to neighbours accusing each other of excessive water use, they now understand the real issue lies in environmental changes.“There’s a consensus on the need to find ways to adapt to climate change,” she adds.

More than a thousand kilometres south-east, in Guangzhou’s Conghua district, Liao Fenglian’s work has undergone a similar reorientation. She works on community development for the Conghua Shengeng Social Work Centre, which has three or four of its nine employees working in five villages in the hills to the north of the district.

Liao tells Dialogue Earth that Shengeng originally focused on “sustainable production” and “community development”. That meant finding markets for sustainable agricultural products made by the villagers, promoting ecological farming techniques and upgrading techniques for processing crops.

But starting in 2017, pest outbreaks brought on by climate change began impacting local crops, leading to an increased outflow of young people to cities and a remaining agricultural workforce consisting largely of older people.

By 2021, the team realised climate change was compounding the crises the villages were facing – ageing populations, agricultural restructuring and shortages of transportation and healthcare. So Liao decided to learn more about it and how to engage in practical responses such as decarbonising agriculture, assessing climate risks, and adaptation and resilience measures.

She explained that villagers used to blame themselves for bad outcomes like poor harvests. Information about the real causes, which often include climate change, usually comes from jargon-heavy government sources. So she set about explaining climate change and its impacts in everyday language. She wanted to empower the villagers; to present climate-adaptation strategies, like diversifying crops or changing planting schedules, as necessary responses to environmental changes, not admissions of personal failure.

The district of Conghua is hilly and prone to rainstorms and flooding. Farming is on the wane, so the local young folk have gone elsewhere to find work. Half of the villagers are in middle or old age. After assessing climate risks, Liao Fenglian’s team decided to focus on identifying crops that would suit these villages.

After some experiments and analysis, they plumped for green plums. In Guangzhou, the green plum blossoms and matures between January and April. That means it can be picked outside of the summer heat and floods. It also suffers less from pests and requires no more than two annual weedings and one application of fertiliser – manageable for older farmers.

Shengeng also “incubated” village cooperatives, encouraging villagers to plant a diverse range of local crops, and enabling them to receive better prices through collective bargaining power. Ecological techniques are now used to grow and process the green plums, turning them into pickles, wine and plum essence.

Green plums can also be smoked for use in Chinese medicine. It took a few years, but they now have a climate-resilient industry growing, processing and selling local crops such as sweet potato, Chinese yam and peanuts. Every year, sales increase and more farmers sign up for the cooperatives: average annual sales have grown from CNY 200,000 (US$27,858) to CNY 750,000 (US$104,468) in three years, while the cooperative has grown from 20 people to almost 100.

Climate educators

Both Yang Fang and Liao have been trained by Shen Dingfang, founder and executive director of Mueang-Nam Sustainable Development Services Centre.

The centre is a charity, which since 2020 has been putting on climate change training for community groups like Zhaotong Yongqing and Shengeng, as well as social-work NGOs.

In 2023, Shen and the Guangdong Harmony Community Foundation launched the Heqi Campaign, organising workshops on assessing climate risks attended by representatives from 68 charities. Attendees were mostly from community groups and social-work organisations, rather than ones focused on the environment or climate.

The range of their work reflects the diversity of rural climate adaptation in China. Some were working on “fodder banks” – meaning community trading and storage platforms for cattle feed – and community climate monitoring in pastoral areas of Inner Mongolia and Tibet, aiming to help herders avoid financial losses.

Some were researching how to adapt traditional building materials to the modern climate in traditional villages in Anhui and Jiangxi. Others were gathering information on traditional agricultural knowledge and crops in the Linpan rural communities of Sichuan. Yet others were helping apiarists in Lisu villages in Yunnan find new areas to raise bees and develop beehives suitable for low temperatures.

Over the last four years, Shen has seen community and social organisations shift from not seeing any need for training on climate to wanting to include climate-adaptation measures in the applications they make for project funding from larger foundations or government bodies.

Many organisations have started working on climate education for communities and even individuals. Alongside its Heqi Campaign, the Guangdong Harmony Community Foundation also has a community climate-adaptation project. The Heyi Institute has a capacity-building programme, and Friends of Nature has since 2021 run its Linglong Project supporting citizen climate actors.

Funds, personnel and international partners

For China’s rural organisations working on climate adaptation, shortages of funds and personnel are a real issue.

An internal survey of 69 social organisations working on climate issues, carried out by the China Association for NGO Cooperation (Cango) and seen by Dialogue Earth, found half had annual incomes of less than CNY 500,000 (US$69,645). This greatly limits the number and type of staff they can hire. Another survey carried out by the Alashan SEE Foundation reached a similar conclusion – of 81 organisations looked at, half had annual incomes of CNY 500,000 or less and between one and five employees.

This describes both Zhaotong Yongqing and Shengeng. The former has three staff, while the latter has nine – all of whom need to support hundreds of people across several villages.

Wang Xiangyi, secretary-general of Cango, which helps Chinese organisations attend the annual UN climate conference, thinks international funding channels could be the answer. She gives the example of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) established at the Cancun climate conference in 2010.

But accessing GCF funds is not straightforward. An organisation needs to undergo a GCF certification process and receive central government backing, plus projects need to involve some degree of international funding. The small-scale nature of most such NGOs’ operations makes these processes challenging. She explained that Cango is proposing to simplify the application process to resolve funding issues for more groups.

“The GCF is both a funding channel and a way of carrying out international capacity building,” she said. Although many Chinese groups are working on climate issues and have achieved real results in their fields, those outcomes are rarely recognised overseas. Improving staffing levels and capacities, and making their achievements known more widely and on a global scale should be the next priority for Chinese organisations working in climate adaptation, she added.