China: Summer drought leaves 18 mln people short of drinking water

[Robbien]

By Thursday, 18.03 million people in 15 Chinese provinces and regions were suffering drinking water shortages caused by the drought, according to Chinese Ministry of Water Resources.

The drought, the worst in 50 years, has left more than 130 million hectares of cropland affected and more than 17 million livestock with reduced water supplies.

Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality and Sichuan Province have been hardest hit and forecasts from the meteorological department say that the hot and dry conditions will continue and rain is very unlikely.

Chongqing has had no rain for more than 70 consecutive days and two-thirds of its rivers have dried up.

Temperatures have not dropped below 35 degrees over the past month in Chongqing and on Tuesday the thermometer hit 42 degrees Celsius.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-08/19/content_4981481.htm

and in a related story

China facing most severe natural disasters in 6 years

BEIJING, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- China is facing its most severe natural disasters for six years, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said on Thursday.

By August 15, the natural disasters that occurred this year had killed 2,006 people, affected more than 316 million people and caused economic losses of 160 billion yuan (20 billion U.S. dollars). The disasters had also resulted in 624 people missing and 12.95million residents being evacuated, and nearly 36 million hectares of farmland have been affected.

A total of 1.53 million houses collapsed during the disasters and more than 4.1 million were destroyed, according to the figures released by the National Center for Disaster Reduction under the ministry.


Compared with past years, the natural disasters this year have occurred earlier and have been stronger in scale and longer in duration. They were also more frequent and of various kinds, leading to high death tolls and great economic losses, according to Li Baojun, an official with the ministry.

In addition, the disasters this year were quite rare to some extent, officials said. "The movement of typhoons were hard to predict, like they were controlled by something," said Wang.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-08/17/content_4974824.htm

[n2doc]

1. no one is immune from global change

And China is the fastest growing polluter.