Climate Crisis

Episode 1

Drought

49 mins

The impacts of climate change are felt in every corner of the world. Extreme drought conditions are increasingly threatening livelihoods, and no corner of the globe seems to be immune from its devastating consequences. In the summers of 2021 and 2022, extreme weather events struck countries all around the world, and China was no exception. In the summer of 2022, China was on the brink of a water catastrophe as it was hit by its worst heatwave ever recorded since 1961, due to its intensity, duration, geographic extent and number of people affected. The country looked like a barren land. The Yangtze River Basin, which stretches from coastal Shanghai to Sichuan province in China's southwest and includes Asia's longest river, was considered the worst-affected area. For more than 70 days straight, the brutal heatwave ravaged much of China, with sustained temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius, day and night, in at least 17 provinces. It affected more than 900 million people.