North China Plain

The plain is one of China's most important agricultural regions, producing wheat, maize, sorghum, millet, peanuts, sesame seed, cotton, and various vegetables.

Many historians have proposed that these factors have encouraged the development of a centralized Chinese state to manage granaries, maintain hydraulic works, and administer fortifications against the steppe peoples.

(The "hydraulic society" school holds that early states developed in the valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow Rivers due to the need to supervise large numbers of laborers to build irrigation canals and control floods.)

Tied to the Classical Chinese writing system, Confucianism swept throughout China and onto Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, heavily influencing their respective political, legal, and educational bureaucracies.

The North China Plain is expected to be highly affected, as the region's extensive irrigation networks result in unusually moist air.

In scenarios without aggressive action to stop climate change, the worst heatwaves are projected to become severe enough to cause mass mortality in agricultural labourers working outdoors.

Under the most extreme climate change scenario, the warming reached by 2100 would be sufficient to cause such heatwaves across the North China Plain approximately once per decade.

Jinan , the capital of Shandong province
This set of maps shows how the summer heat stress over the North China Plain would change between now at the end of the century under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 , the scenarios of "moderate" and intense climate change. It also shows how irrigation would exacerbate heat stress compared to a counterfactual where it is absent. [ 5 ]