China has issued a warning of the first national drought this year when the authorities fight forest fires and mobilize a specialist team to protect plants from the hot temperatures throughout the Yangtze watershed.

National ‘Yellow Alert’, issued Thursday night, came after the area from Sichuan in the Southwest to Shanghai in Delta Yangtze had experienced extreme heat for weeks, with government officials repeatedly quoting global climate change as the cause. The warning is two notes from the most serious warning on the Beijing scale.

In one of the important flood basins in the Central China Jiangxi Province, Lake Poyang is now shrinking to a quarter of the normal size for this year, the Xinhua State News Agency said on Thursday.

A total of 66 rivers in 34 districts in the southwest of Chongqing have dried up, the CCTV state announcer said on Friday.

Rainfall in Chongqing this year fell 60 percent compared to seasonal norms, and land in some districts is very short of humidity, said CCTV, citing local government data.

Beibei District, northern downtown Chongqing, saw the temperature reaching 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, according to the Chinese weather bureau.

Chongqing contributed six of the 10 hottest locations in the country on Friday morning, with the temperature in the Bishan District it was approaching 39 degrees Celsius. Shanghai is at 37 degrees.

Chongqing regional infrastructure and emergency services have increased, with alert firefighters while on mountains and forests erupted throughout the region. Government media also reported an increase in heatstroke cases.

Gas utilities in the Fuling District also told customers on Friday that they would cut supplies to further notification when they deal with “serious safety dangers”.

The Chongqing Agricultural Bureau has also formed a team of experts to protect vulnerable plants and expand planting to compensate for losses ahead of the autumn harvest.

The Ministry of Water Resources has instructed drought agricultural areas to compile rotas determine who can access supplies at a certain time, to ensure they are not exhausted.

According to data from the Chinese Emergency Ministry on Thursday night, high temperatures in July alone caused direct economic losses of 2.73 billion yuan ($ 400 million), which affected 5.5 million people.

Meanwhile, the Chinese National Meteorology Center (NMC) renewed a high-temperature red warning on Friday, the 30th day in a row that had issued a warning, he said on his Weibo channel. The country’s fortune teller also estimates that the current heat waves will only begin to subside on August 26.

The weather agency said in its daily bulletin that 4.5 million square kilometers of the national region have now experienced a temperature of 35 degrees Celsius or more over the past month – almost half of the country’s total areas – with more than 200 weather stations recorded the highest record.