Environmental Issues of India and China
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China's Air Pollution and Flooding
Causes
Effects
Flooding
Causes
- China has high levels of PM2.5, a particle that is hazardous when clustered in an area
- PM2.5 is one of the major causes of air pollution
- The levels of the normally non-visible particle in China is so high that people can start to see
- Much of the pollution is the result of burning coal to keep warm in the winter because it increases the amount of PM2.5 in the air
- Air pollutants such as industry, cars, power plants, burning agriculture, and biomass fuels add to pollution
- Most common in the winter because all the air pollution hovers over the country and people burn the most coal around that time
Effects
- Impacts of air pollution is increasing as conditions get worse
- Sicknesses are caused when PM2.5 enters the bloodstream or lung
- The pollution has caused sicknesses such as
- Heart disease
- Lung cancer
- Respiratory diseases
- Asthma
- Death
- 1.6 million deaths each year from bad air quality
- The Asian Brown Cloud is created by burning bio fuels, coal, and wood, which produces soot, burning these fuels creates a ground-level ozone layer, containing chemicals such as methane, nitrogen oxide, and carbon monoxide
- Plants are being harmed by the ground-level ozone layer
- Crops are harder to grow due to the dark cloud stopping the sunlight from reaching the plants, so food production levels decrease
Flooding
Causes
- Floods happen often in southern China during monsoon seasons
- Occur in the Yangtze River basin
- The basin is home to 400 million people, moving into the basin meant cutting out as much as 85% of the forest. This forest held large amounts of rain from the monsoons. Now that it is gone, the monsoon rain can flow into the homes of millions of people
- Crowded areas at the basin with millions of buildings and houses provide less land to take in the amount of rainfall
- Higher temperatures are linked to larger monsoons because when more water is evaporated, the storm becomes larger
- About 3% of China's farmland had been drowned, this causes many businesses to shut down, and China's economy to fall
- 2000 people have died
- About 14 million people's homes have been destroyed
- 80,000 pigs died by drowning and 3.5 million ducks and birds died
- Drowning of livestock, people are afraid they are eating meat from animals that have drowned in floods
- Somehow, drowned animals were still being sold to eat in restaurants illegally, angering many customers
Yangtze River flooding/ From Britannica Images