Politicians make the policy. But it’s often left to business to implement it. For this reason RioPlus Business is featuring submissions from business across the globe in the lead up to Rio+20.
The aim is to demonstrate how Sustainable Development is becoming a reality on every continent, country and city.
Here the Shanshui Conservation Center’s Meng Si explains how one small community in south-west China is fighting drought with some simple and inexspensive solutions.
Climate change is ever more visible in our lives, and rising numbers of people have personal stories to tell about the harm its impacts can inflict.
But do communities that have so far been left unscathed realise they may have been protected by nature?
If you mention climate change to the people of south-west China, most of them will talk about last year’s great drought.
From September 2009 to March 2010, Yunnan province saw just half its normal rainfall for the time of year – the lowest level since 1951.
But Wen Cheng has more vivid memories of a drought in the early 1990s, when he was 10 years old.
He remembers taps working for only a few hours in the middle of the night, and even then producing only a trickle. If he wanted to wash, he had to go with his parents to the public bathhouse.
Wen’s hometown, the small city of Gejiu, was largely unaffected by last year’s drought, unlike surrounding areas. Water here was not rationed.
Wen, now a post-doctoral fellow at Peking University’s Centre for Nature and Society, says his research [...]
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