Is Climate Change in Rural Areas Really Just a “Natural Disaster”?
Foodthink Says
What kind of agricultural system and rural reality do today’s farmers truly inhabit?
How should we understand the macro-level issue of climate change when set against the micro, concrete realities of rural life?
And how can organisations rooted in rural communities combine climate action with the practical needs of rural development?
These questions are far from adequately explored.
This April, with the support of Oxfam (Hong Kong)’s Beijing office, Foodthink and the Guangxi Climate Change Action Network held the “Workshop on Climate Change Responses by Rural Social Organisations” in Nanning.
Under the theme “When Heaven’s Timing Fails, People Become ‘United'”, the workshop gathered participants of diverse backgrounds — farmers, village cadres, returning entrepreneurs, grassroots organisations rooted in rural communities, researchers, and funders — to think together about the possibilities for social organisations working in rural areas under a changing climate. Let us see what remarkable remarks and discussions took place across the two-day workshop.
I. Climate Change Through Farmers’ Eyes
Feng Lian is from Huichang County, Ganzhou, in Jiangxi Province. Her village mainly grows navel oranges. In 2022, after four months of sustained heat and drought, the village was suddenly hit by more than a month of heavy rain. In that abrupt shift from drought to flooding, the navel oranges — planted across vast swathes of the village — absorbed so much water that the flesh swelled excessively. More than half the ripe oranges split open before they could be picked. “Even a cooked duck flew away,” the villagers said. Other “people from the village” went on to mention moulding grain heads in rice still at maturity after days of endless rain, Wogan mandarin fruits ruined by frost, and cattle and sheep killed by the heat.
Stories like these fill the abstract narrative of climate change with flesh and blood. On this basis, the workshop’s participants developed a more direct and concrete understanding of what climate change actually means on the ground.
Yet for farmers, these lived, place-specific experiences are not merely case studies to illustrate a macro-level climate narrative. Of course, when faced with uncontrollable extreme weather — fierce winds, torrential rain, hail — farmers can only bear it passively. But very often, in the process of solving everyday practical problems, they are already taking steps to respond to climate change, consciously or not, whether or not they frame it in climate terms.
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For example, in tackling drought, Dai Yunyun from Guliu Village in Xianshui Town, Quanzhou County, Guilin, Guangxi, suggested that growing heirloom rice varieties, long selected by the local natural ecology, can effectively boost drought and disease resistance. Feng Lian shared her own experience of retaining grass cover to preserve soil moisture and help fruit trees survive months-long drought. Fan Hanquan, the village Party secretary of Meitou Village in Liancheng, Longyan, Fujian, noted that diversifying crops helps guard against concentrated pest outbreaks triggered by heat and drought.
Yang Lan, from the Sichuan Haihui Centre for Poverty Alleviation, believes farmers often possess their own wisdom in perceiving and responding to climate change. She mentioned that some growers do not simply use the traditional Twenty-four Solar Terms to forecast the weather, but also read one solar term’s weather to predict what comes next — snowfall in winter, for instance, portends spring rains. She also described how her father, an apple grower in Gansu, learned mulching techniques during an agricultural training session run by a social organisation, and successfully prevented soil erosion caused by hail by laying straw over the soil.
Clearly, when it comes to climate change, farmers are neither without perception nor lacking in methods to respond. Even where gaps remain, they can strengthen their capacity for climate action through ongoing learning. But the real question is this: when other real-world factors pile on top of climate change to bear upon farmers’ livelihoods and lives, do they still have the confidence and the energy to take climate action?The discussion that followed continued to revolve around this question.
Among the real-world factors the speakers raised, they can broadly be divided into internal and external ones. Internal factors mainly concern a village’s labour and finances, while external factors point more towards the unpredictable agricultural market — though in many cases the two are closely intertwined.
For Feng Lian, the most pressing problem has been Huanglongbing (citrus greening disease) devastating the village’s vast navel orange orchards. Although some scientific evidence suggests that the spread of Huanglongbing is inextricably linked to climate change, Feng Lian believes that whether villagers actively combat the disease depends not on understanding the causal chain between climate change and Huanglongbing, but on whether navel orange market prices give growers the confidence to make small-scale adaptations. When prices were good, farmers could still persevere by felling affected trees, netting the canopy or injecting antibiotics. But two years of dismal prices have long since eroded the villagers’ faith in fighting Huanglongbing.
Climate change is also driving pasture degradation in grazing regions, in turn undermining herders’ livelihoods. Chen Jingjing from Tusheng Studio spoke about herders in a Gacha in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, and their reluctance to sell livestock alongside mounting debt. Yet tracing the roots of the problem reveals that market forces and human-made factors dominate: falling beef and mutton prices prompt herders to withhold stock and borrow to sustain production and daily expenses; the government’s “increase cattle, reduce sheep” policy bans grazing; grassland nature reserves overlap with herders’ pastures, squeezing their livelihoods; and herders who must buy hay on credit face actual interest rates that are excessively high, and so on.
Chen Jingjing believes a viable path forward is to organise the herders from within: first, encourage groups of three to five households to run their operations jointly, sharing pasture while grazing herds separately to expand the grazing radius; second, procure fodder at township scale so that individual herders are not “squeezed” by the supply chain when buying grass on credit; and third, pursue branding so that quality beef can find its way to Beijing.
In addition, Yang Lan mentioned that northwestern regions are prone to hail in summer. County governments would notify two specially trained villagers to use a cannon to bombard hail clouds and avert hail damage. But once those two villagers left to seek migrant work elsewhere, this method of coping with extreme weather lapsed.
These internal and external factors may not appear to be directly linked to climate change on the surface, yet they are the difficulties farmers face most acutely, and they genuinely shape whether rural communities can mount a climate response. Unpacking these more concrete and complex connections between climate change and rural realities is work that must be done by social organisations truly rooted in local communities.
II. How Do Social Organisations Rooted in Rural Areas Take Action?
Although in the earlier discussion Feng Lian had been introduced as a “person from the village” from a navel orange-growing region in Jiangxi, her day job is as a project officer at a social organisation called Shenggen. For years she has worked on climate change and community development projects in a mountain village in Conghua District, Guangzhou. She noted that the irrigation channels in the Conghua project village had collapsed and water was no longer flowing smoothly — part of the reason was continuous rainfall causing weeds to choke the banks and silt to accumulate, and part was the exodus of villagers leaving insufficient investment in managing the water source. The “tailored” strategy, then, is to work alongside villagers to sort out the shared interests at stake, and from the perspective of the village’s common environment, encourage collective clearing and repair of the irrigation channels — a solution that simply cannot emerge from empty talk about climate change.
The impact of climate change compounded by the “hollow village” phenomenon is posing new challenges for rural communities. Yang Fang from the Yunnan Zhaotong Yongqing Rural Development Service Centre spoke about how increasingly severe drought and frequent extreme heat are leaving elderly residents left behind in the countryside facing water shortages for farming and daily life, the worsening of chronic conditions, social isolation and mental health risks — and how the Yongqing Centre is drawing together multiple social resources so that elderly residents find both care and joy.
Guangxi, too, has seen drought intensify in recent years. Huang Weiwei from the Guangxi Guoren Rural Poverty Alleviation and Development Centre introduced the traditional wisdom of growing drought-adapted crops and storing water in cisterns in karst rural areas, and how Guoren builds on local experience to mitigate flood and drought disasters and tackle rocky desertification through low-cost approaches that villagers are happy to embrace.
Representatives from the Farmer Seed Network and the Yunnan Sili Technology Alternatives Centre also spoke about linking the conservation of heirloom seeds and the development of ecological agriculture techniques with farmers’ local culture.
Almost all agreed that the climate change lens is extremely useful for helping social organisation workers understand the risk factors affecting rural communities, but action must be rooted in villagers’ own perceptions and understanding, and tightly linked to the endogenous drive of villagers and the village, if it is to lead to truly effective action.
Sometimes “connection” is not confined to the level of action; it also shapes the strategies social organisations adopt, particularly in their dealings with government. Huang Weiwei noted that the methods of ecological restoration for rocky desertification that the local government has worked out together with farmers are worth learning from, and she is actively seeking collaboration on this. Zuo Zhi shared how, in the course of its work and advocacy, the Yunnan Sili Technology Alternatives Centre has sought partnerships with local government and national scientific research institutions, taking on the task of bridging the last mile between research and practice so that technology pathways truly take root on the ground.
Drawing on years of project collaboration with government, Chen Jingjing from Tusheng Studio offered more direct advice: if a social organisation wants to secure government policy support to achieve its goals, the first step is to find a small entry point — turning abstract concepts into concrete people and stories. Chen Jingjing gave an example: “If you want to address the deterioration of water quality in a reservoir, then your policy recommendation should mention the livelihood struggle of elderly women in the village who still have to carry water on foot to irrigate their fields, or the community health concerns raised by the rising number of cancer cases near the reservoir. Only then will your framing of the problem carry real persuasive force.”
“Moreover, tie it to what the government needs — or rather, to their KPIs. Talking about climate change in isolation may get you nowhere, but if the county Party secretary hears that it is linked to ecological assessment indicators, they might approve the project on the spot,” he said.
Chi Jing from the Guilin Bo’ai Social Work Service Centre, sharing her experience in rural disaster prevention and relief work, also noted: “If other partners want to replicate good practices such as a villagers’ emergency response team, then while carrying out the work, you need to mobilise the relevant departments — the county Emergency Management Bureau, the Social Work Department, and even the Bureau of Veterans’ Affairs — to coordinate and provide support, and things will go somewhat more smoothly.”
III. What Do Funders Think About Responding to Climate Change?
Shu Junsong from the Amity Foundation mentioned that the Amity Foundation’s climate change projects focus on building resilient communities. He explained that, looking at visible outcomes alone, many of the activities under resilient community projects were in fact already being carried out in community development work twenty years ago — they may have taken the form of small-scale infrastructure such as digging a water channel or a flood drainage ditch. “But today, how we understand and carry out resilient community building from a climate change perspective — that is what is truly critical.”
He believes that the methods and tools for climate change risk assessment and response developed by some foundations and social organisations are very useful, as they can help more organisations begin to understand rural development through a climate change lens. “If an organisation can use these tools to seriously conduct a climate change risk assessment and analysis, that at least shows they have thought carefully about their climate-related projects. Strengthening a community’s own capacity to respond to climate change through projects — that is important.”
Hu Wei from Oxfam pointed out that a great many extreme weather events and climate disasters have already caused enormous losses to frontline communities and projects in progress, and the risks posed by climate change must be taken seriously. When social organisations seek to introduce a climate change perspective into their community work, she said, they first need to be clear about why they are doing so and how. She also noted that different social organisations have their own areas of expertise — some focus on women, the elderly, children, livelihood development, disaster prevention and relief, and so on — and that how these existing pathways of work can integrate with a climate perspective is a question requiring further reflection and discussion.
Chen Xuechong, also from Oxfam, shared his understanding of the relationship between a climate perspective and community work. One situation is knowing what and also knowing why: for example, when building a dam, we understand both the relationship between dam construction and climate change and the practical impact the dam itself has on the community. The other is that one need not fully understand the underlying reasons, but must know what is happening. “For example, when promoting biological control of pests and diseases, we may not know the link between pest outbreaks and climate change, but as long as the control work itself is effective, it can be regarded as an adaptation action.”
In response to the above discussion, philanthropic funding consultant Chen Shuqian offered her own view: often the connection between climate change and community work is something that takes time to observe. For instance, concrete production generates greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, so some organisations advocate that villages build houses with locally sourced lightweight materials — does this meet the application requirements for climate change projects? The question of how the macro-level issue of climate change should actually be brought down to specific communities calls for leaving social organisations some space, whether through joint learning, preliminary research or general discussion. Funders should take a hands-on approach, exploring alongside social organisations the multi-dimensional practices that emerge once climate action lands on the ground.
Li Ziyue from Community Partners has been supporting smallholder farmer development projects since 2004. “Over these twenty years, I have witnessed countless smallholders struggle and grow through ecological transition.” In Li Ziyue’s view, technology is certainly important, but what matters more in the long run is cultivating people’s ecological awareness. Facing the complex impacts of climate change, he believes social organisations should deepen their learning of ecological perspectives, foster dialogue between science and tradition, and help more people understand climate change from different angles and come to appreciate the value of every living being’s existence.
Tianle, founding editor of Foodthink, mentioned the two UN climate conferences she had recently attended. What surprised her was that “every country is talking about how to split the money — the numbers are enormous — but when you listen to what they actually plan to do, it doesn’t seem so closely linked to climate change, and may not even be more valuable than what our smallholders are trying.”
Smallholders, especially ecological smallholders, have made considerable contributions to emissions reduction, but because of insufficient data to substantiate these efforts, recognition has always been hard to come by. “We have already missed the chance to tell the world about ecological smallholders’ efforts to reduce emissions. We should learn from that and think about how to better combine ecological agriculture with climate adaptation,” she said.
Tianle also expressed puzzlement about the current state of climate change funding: many social organisations’ speciality is community work — must these organisations translate their work into the language of climate change? Or would it perhaps be more efficient, for the sector as a whole, for funders to undertake this “translation” themselves?
Tianle summed up her expectations for the philanthropy sector’s response to climate change in one word: common sense. “What measures are lower-carbon, more adaptive — ordinary people have common sense about this, and we social organisations should too.”
After the discussion wrapped up, participants at the venue broke into small-group discussions on the theme “What can social organisations do for rural areas?”, covering the basic situation of the four “people from the village” and their communities, the main challenges they face, the potential compounding effects of climate change, the different groups and stakeholders involved in any action, and how to secure support — and offered ideas and advice for the development of these four villages.
Finally, the workshop invited the Guilin Blue Sky Rescue Team to lead participants through a water emergency rescue drill. The physical exertion gave everyone a more tangible sense of the disastrous consequences that climate change could bring.
Event Preview
Unless otherwise noted, all images are supplied by the speakers. On-site photographs are taken by Mr Wang Jian of the Guangxi Climate Change Action Network — our sincere thanks to him.
Compiled by: Yuyang
Edited by: Lingyu