The tea processing workshop of Liu Juan's family, villagers of Liugou Village.
Liugou Village, located in Qinba Mountains of southern Shaanxi Province, is highly vulnerable to climate change and has weak community adaptation capabilities. The village has 320 households and about 1,013 residents, spread across 30 mountain ridges and valleys. It is famous for its tea leaves, which is the main livelihood of the villagers. Liu Juan and her husband cultivate ten acres of tea trees in the village. The family tea workshop is filled with the fragrance of fresh tea all day long.
Liu Juan was elected as the women's leader by the villagers, handling community affairs during the day and working with her family to harvest and process tea leaves at night, selling the tea leaves to wholesalers for distribution nationwide.
However, their peaceful life was disrupted by a once-in-60-year torrential rain. On 9 July 2012, in just two hours, 170 millimetres of rainfall turned into a flash flood, carrying mud and rocks, destroying roads, houses, and tea fields in the village. Liu's house, located by the river, was the first to be hit, with muddy floodwaters inundating the entire house and yard. Liu Juan recalled, "the flood rushed in like a monster, soaking 7,000 jin of freshly harvested tea, ruining all the furniture we bought when we got married, and the refrigerator was flushed away into the yard, its plug dripping with mud." After the flood receded, the tea fields were covered with gravel, the village roads turned into rocky beaches, and the entire village seemed like tea leaves smashed into pieces by a giant hand.
Working Together to Rebuild Homes
Oxfam Hong Kong and a local partner, the Shaanxi Volunteer Mothers Association for Environmental Protection, began working in Liugou Village in 2012. Our work included emergency relief, post-disaster reconstruction, ecological village building, and climate change adaptation. We supported villagers in repairing infrastructure damaged by the flood, provided disaster prevention training, formulated community disaster preparedness plans, renovated tea gardens and improved tea cultivation techniques. These efforts greatly enhanced the community's climate resilience, reduced carbon emissions from agricultural production, and improved the ecological environment of the community.
Disaster evacuation drills are regularly organised in Liugou Village.
Liugou Village has a small population, but the villagers are united and supportive of each other, and there are dedicated individuals like Liu Juan who drive the community's development. The villagers of Liugou Village have rebuilt their lives from the disaster, believing that mutual support and green development can bring a prosperous future. Currently, the villagers have set a goal to achieve zero carbon emissions in tea leaves cultivation; they are actively learning and taking action to mitigate climate change.
