The rising South China Sea and the overstressed Pearl River network lie just a meter or so below much of this new multitrillion-dollar development —
and they are poised to drown decades of progress, scrambling global supply chains and raising prices on a world of goods like smartphones, T-shirts, biopharmaceuticals and even the tiny springs inside your ballpoint pens.
Here in Guangdong Province, all the new cars, the concrete
and the belching factories spike temperatures, endangering sick and elderly people, creating urban heat islands and incubating pandemics like dengue fever, an outbreak of which slammed Guangzhou in 2014, afflicting 47,000 people.
Rising Waters Threaten China’s Rising Cities -
In the Pearl River Delta, breakneck development is colliding with the effects of climate change.
New research shows that rising temperatures and stagnant air resulting from climate change — caused largely by worldwide emissions
of carbon dioxide — are exacerbating China’s smog crisis, which has contributed to millions of premature deaths.
Guangzhou, formerly Canton, had more than a million people,
but by the 1980s, China set out to transform the whole region, capitalizing on its proximity to water, the energy of its people, and the money and port infrastructure of neighboring Hong Kong.
