Extreme weather, agricultural carbon emissions, adaptation, and mitigation strategies.
Extreme weather in the north, including flooding and successive droughts, has pushed the No. 1 Document to strengthen disaster prevention. The first appearance of low-carbon agriculture moves the climate agenda from adapting to risks to emissions reduction; the key remains involving small farmers and ensuring they benefit.
At Jishi, an eco-organic vegetable shop in Beijing, Foodthink’s eight members transformed from consumers into shop staff for 12 nonstop hours—identifying vegetables, packing, live-streaming, washing lamb broth bowls—and saw how selling vegetables ripples through shop service, supply chains, and domestic labour.
Shaanxi’s drought robs the land of its fruit, torrential rain over North China washes out rice paddies, delivery riders sprint to the algorithm, Brazilian ‘fake meat’ lands on Qinghai–Tibet herders’ tables – in 2025, climate, capital and trade all tighten, squeezing smallholders into the narrowest corner.
Nearly a hundred participants assembled article titles and Cantonese dishes into eight climate science fiction novellas; a documentary probes imported meat’s impact on the pastoral regions around Qinghai Lake; a forum examines extreme weather’s cascading changes to agriculture and the dining table.
Wenzizi and Changjiaoling, graduates of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, created a satoyama on 30 mu of shallow hills in Beijing’s suburbs, coexisting with hailstorms, rainy seasons, and insects and birds. This year they have turned their farming experience into a new book, Farming in the Satoyama.
Zhen Rui’s 450-mu farm – thirteen years of cultivation – turned to silt overnight, wiping out at least 30 million yuan. He has replanted sweet corn in heated greenhouses two kilometres away, but whether the land can be farmed again and where the money will come from remain open.
Harvesters mired in mud, cobs moulded overnight, good grain at just 0.3 yuan a jin — after drought gave way to waterlogging, farmers in six Hebei and Henan counties have lost ground at every stage, while drying towers and insurance remain out of reach for most farms.
IPES-FOOD’s report Fuel to Fork dissects how the food system consumes at least 15% of the world’s fossil fuels—from nitrogen fertiliser in the fields and ultra-processed foods and plastic in factories, to supermarket refrigerated cabinets and household stoves—and offers eight decoupling recommendations.
Disaster relief worker Hao Nan led disaster relief organisation Zhuoming’s team back to the Miyun and Xinglong disaster areas to reconstruct how abnormal mountain floods formed and how the grassroots judged evacuation timing. Grassroots disaster prevention and reduction still lack funding, staff and technical calculations.
SiLi in Yunnan promotes ridge-and-furrow irrigation reduced-water rice across Kunming, Honghe and Pu’er, partnering from county agricultural technology stations to Hani terrace farmers. But along the way, farming friends discuss tillering, yield and how deep to dig a well—not emission reduction.
