The New Normal: East Asia’s Brutal Heatwave

A brutal heatwave across East Asia has devastated agriculture, leaving one farmer Lee Sang-hyuk with an entirely spoiled potato crop in Yanggu county, 80 miles (130km) north-east of Seoul, South Korea. 

The extreme ground heat effectively cooked the produce in the soil, turning a healthy-looking field into mush within a single week. 

Speaking to local broadcaster SBS, Lee expressed heartbreak over the widespread damage. His ruined livelihood reflects the broader impact of record-breaking summer temperatures currently impacting South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. As per a news report from The Guardian published August 13, 2026. 

In fact, two Sundays ago, the south-eastern city of Yangsan recorded a temperature of 42.5C, the highest registered in South Korea since modern weather observations began in 1904. 

The scorching heat has since been blamed for at least 31 deaths nationwide, according to the country’s disease control agency, while more than 900,000 livestock and 1.4 million farmed fish have died. 

Authorities issued a heat warning, urging people to “immediately stop all outdoor activities”. 

South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, told his cabinet the extreme weather was “unlike anything we have experienced before”. 

“We need to make efforts for a fundamental overhaul of the national crisis system”, he said, “since this extreme weather is becoming the new normal”. 

In neighbouring Japan, temperatures reached 40C or higher at multiple locations and the country recorded its first ever “kokushobi”, or “cruelly hot day”, a new category introduced this year by the country’s weather agency for temperatures above 40C. In Tokyo, three lions died of suspected heatstroke at a city zoo. 

Scientists say the extremes are part of a wider pattern. Researchers working through Japan’s Weather Attribution Centre found that the country’s intense July heat would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming. 

Without the warming caused by human activity, they calculated, a heatwave of this scale would occur on average once ever 10,000 years. The heat struck even as an El Niño event was under way, a natural climate pattern that has in the past been associated with a lower likelihood of extreme summer heat in Japan. 

In Hong Kong, its observatory posted an official temperature of 36.9C, the highest recorded there since records began in 1884, as the outer bands of Typhoon Dolphin swept hot air over the city. 

In China’s western Xinjiang region, a weather station recorded a 50C reading in July and heatwaves gripped the country’s north-east, while North Korea reported a run of tropical nights in Pyongyang, with temperatures failing to fall below 25C. 

The World Meteorological Organization said in their latest State of the Climate in Asia report that the pace of Asia’s warming between 1991 and 2025 is roughly twice that of the preceding three decades. 

June-Yi Lee (right), a climate scientist at Pusan National University and a coordinating lead author of the UN’s most recent climate assessment, warned that heatwaves were expected to become more frequent and intense as the climate heated up, while compound extremes, such as consecutive heatwaves and heavy rainfall, were becoming more common. 

“There is an urgent need for rapid, large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to limit further global warming together with well-planned adaptation measures to address the climate change that is already occurring”, she said.