AFP: The North China Plain, home to nearly 400 million people, could become a life-threatening inferno during future heat waves if climate change continues apace, researchers have warned.
Soaring temperatures combined with high humidity — made worse by the region’s dense irrigation network — means the China’s breadbasket faces “the greatest risk to human life from rising temperatures of any location on Earth,” they said in a statement.
Megacities Beijing and Tianjin both fall within the densely populated plain, along with other major urban areas. But it is tens of millions of farmers working outside that will be most at risk.
Even if humanity manages to slow the pace of global warming, hot spells across the region could, by century’s end, exceed the human body’s ability to cope, the scientists reported this week in the journal Nature Communications.
“This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heatwaves in the future, especially under climate change,” said lead author MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir, who has published similar assessments of the Arabian Gulf region and South Asia.