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. On top of this are the floods and tidal surges, worsened by a mix of increasingly severe storms and land sinking under the sheer weight of development — amplifying the impact of rising waters.
