The Heart-Wrenching Flood Disasters and the Climate Crisis Behind Them
Waking up early and opening the news, I saw that the floods in Henan Province had killed more than ten people; my mood instantly sank. May the deceased rest in peace, and may their families find solace. From the news videos and pictures, this flood disaster in Zhengzhou was truly horrific.
As a farm boy born in a riverside region of Hubei, I have seen plenty of floods in my life. In my childhood, every summer our hometown would enter flood-prevention mode, and every household would send one or two able-bodied adults to join flood fighting. After I started high school I also took part; our village had two rivers whose embankments often burst in flood season, and to defend our homes we carried sandbags to reinforce the banks.
As a child, our hometown grew two rice crops a year; summer was the "double rush"—hurry to harvest early rice and hurry to transplant late rice—and we often harvested rice anxiously in the rain. We often ate moldy rice in those days, because once heavy rain came, the rice was soaked in water and easily went moldy. The adults always sold the unmoldy grain to city people—only unmoldy grain fetched a good price—while the moldy grain was kept for ourselves to eat. Now I often urge people not to eat moldy food because it is carcinogenic, but when I was a child the countryside was poor and farmers had no choice; struck by floods, most had to eat moldy grain. While eating rice cooked from moldy paddy, my mother never failed to tell us: study hard, leap out of farming in the future, go to the city to work, and never endure this hardship again.
The great flood of 1998 surrounded our village like an island, and we had to take boats in and out. Our house leaned against a small hillside, and such a huge flood caused severe landslides; every day we lived in fear. I still remember the scene vividly: a fish-farming largeholder in our village wailed by his pond, because it had become a vast sea and the fish had all escaped; his years of hard-earned money had gone to waste. When I entered university, I was classified as an extremely needy student from a disaster area, and the school waived my tuition.
When Hubei flooded again in 2020, two corpses drifted up by our village river—the bodies of two teenage sisters from a village not far upstream. It is said that as the flood approached, the older sister was washing a mop by the river and was suddenly swept into the current; the younger sister went to pull her and was also dragged in, and so the two sisters perished in the flood. When my father told me this on the phone, I grieved for a long time afterward.
I have indeed fulfilled my parents' wish: after university I left the countryside. But the brand that childhood floods seared into my heart can never be erased. Floods are ruthless, but people are compassionate; in flood disasters, the mutual aid and kindness among people are revealed. During flood fighting everyone was deeply united; I have personally felt that mutual warmth. Seeing people in the Zhengzhou flood risk their lives to rescue others, I was deeply moved. Sometimes the hostility online may make us doubt the hearts of people, but whenever disaster strikes we still see that the innate nature of the great majority is kind.
Judging by the frequency of floods worldwide in recent years, disasters are becoming more frequent, and the climate crisis is no longer just a warning from anxious scientists—it is actually happening. Global temperatures are already about 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Scientists noted back in the 19th century that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature, atmospheric moisture increases by 7%, and heavy rainfall increases accordingly; this is why once-in-a-century downpours have become so common in recent years.
Every year millions lose their homes to floods. Global warming is making ecologically vulnerable countries and regions ever less habitable; island nations like the Maldives may even disappear beneath the ocean in the not-too-distant future. Rising air temperature and humidity are also driving up the prevalence of related diseases: hundreds of thousands of additional deaths each year from extreme weather, and more and more patients with allergic diseases, diarrhea and eczema, as well as increasing respiratory and digestive infections.
Energy conservation and emission reduction are urgent. People worldwide should restrain their behavior, and each of us has a responsibility to live a low-carbon life. The climate crisis is caused by all of us; our endless pursuit of a better life has overburdened the Earth. Some may view this problem against the 4-billion-year history of the Earth and feel it is not worth worrying about the ecological crisis—that is pure nonsense. At present humanity has only this one home; if we want to live on Earth longer, we must exercise restraint.