Xi Jinping’s Presidency in Washington, D.C., Meets Vladimir Putin at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
At a Communist Party congress this week, Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader for the last 10 years, is all but certain to secure another five years in the job. Xi’s recent predecessors each left office after about a decade to protect China from abuses of power like those during the chaotic Mao era. As economic growth teeters and tensions soar with the West, it is expected that Xi will cast this precedent aside and make the country a more authoritarian place.
China wants to reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming. He said the same things this week in grandiose language. The principle that the waters and mountains are valuable must be upheld. But he has also allied himself with a leader whose actions are threatening to throw the global climate fight in reverse: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
This summer, China sweltered through more than two months of record-high temperatures, the country’s most prolonged heat wave since modern records began in 1961. The Yangtze River dried to a trickle. Factories halted production to reduce the burden on power grids. The government’s chief forecaster, Chen Lijuan, told a Communist Party news outlet that the extreme highs could become a “new normal.”
The shift of manufacturing to Asia has resulted in a big increase in infrastructure investment in already vulnerable parts of China, making it more susceptible to the effects of climate change.
Climate risk specialists XDI assessed more than 2,600 regions around the globe, using climate models and weather data to find out how temperature rises will hurt the economy by the mid-sixties.
The study is based on a 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in temperatures by the end of the century, under a scenario drawn up by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Some engine rooms of the global economy face a host of disasters, which could lower property prices and deter investment, according to the data.
“Infrastructure investment has tended to be concentrated in areas that have traditionally been very high-risk – river deltas, coastal zones, and relatively flat areas,” he said.
A Survey on the XDI Top 50 Regions: Adaptability, Protectability, and Climate in the Restricted Country of the World
The highest ranking non-Chinese region was Florida in 10th place, with California 19th, Texas 20th and New York 46th. Nine territories from India were in the top 50.
While climate is likely to become increasingly decisive when it comes to determining the flow of capital, it remains to be seen whether it will deter investment in more vulnerable regions, said Karl Mallon, XDI’s co-founder.
There is a lot of work to be done to figure out which areas in the world are potentially adaptable and defendable, and which will likely be abandoned.