What Does Climate Change Mean to China's Security?

by RP Siegel
Aug 20, 2015 9:00 AM ET

Justmeans

A recent report by Zheng Haibin, a professor at Peking University highlights the potential impact of climate change China’s national security. Haibin claims that climate change will endanger China’s defense and damage critical strategic infrastructure. Specifically, he called out several vulnerabilities:

  • Reduced rainfall and increased temperatures will lead to desertification in the dry north and west, stretching already thin water supplies, threatening the decades-old Green Great Wall. Increasing temperatures in the west could cause thawing permafrost to buckle hundreds of miles of the newly constructed, multi-billion dollar Qinghai-Tibet Railway jeopardizing this strategic link to Tibet.

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Image credit: Jérémy: Flickr Creative Commons

RP Siegel, author and inventor, shines a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. He has been published in business and technical journals and has written three books. His third, co-authored with Roger Saillant, is Vapor Trails, an eco-thriller that is being adapted for the big screen. RP is a professional engineer – and a prolific inventor, with 50 patents, numerous awards, and several commercial products. He is president of Rain Mountain LLC and is an active environmental advocate in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. In addition to Justmeans, he writes for Triple Pundit, ThomasNet News, and Energy Viewpoints, occasionally contributing to Mechanical Engineering, Strategy + Business, and Huffington Post.