Natural disasters affected 41.8 million people and left 94 dead or missing in China in August, the country’s Ministry of Emergency Management said on Friday.
The same source said that droughts and floods were the most prominent disasters, although hailstorms, earthquakes, typhoons and forest fires were also recorded.
The “direct economic losses” from the disasters amounted to 42.79 billion yuan (6.122 billion euros).
The authorities recalled that, in August, the Asian country recorded the highest average number of days with high temperatures in its history, which caused a “severe drought in the Yangtze River basin”, the longest in China.
A severe drought, unprecedented in decades, has caused power cuts in the central province of Sichuan, one of the worst affected.
In summer, the average level of precipitation in the Yangtze basin was 40% lower than the same period last year.
The lack of rain has caused more than 200,000 people to have problems accessing drinking water and more than 600,000 hectares of farmland have been damaged in the central province of Hubei.
“Extremely high temperatures” sparked a “significantly higher” number of fires in the country compared to August 2021, the ministry said.
The ministry also reported “flash flooding” in some rivers, especially “in the northern part of the country.”
Local meteorologist Chen Lijuan recently explained that periods of intense heat, which start “earlier and end later,” could become the “new normal” in the Asian country, under “the effect of climate change.”
Source: TSF
