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China’s breakthrough growth over the past four decades has built high-rise cities with hamlets and farmland. Cities attracted factories and factories attracted workers. The boom has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of the poverty and rural hardships they once faced.

Now these cities face the daunting new challenge of adapting. extreme weather conditions caused by climate changeIt’s a possibility that few thought too highly of as the country began its extraordinary economic transformation. China’s absurd, vibrant urbanization has in some ways made this challenge difficult to meet.

No weather event can be directly linked to climate change, but Thunder At least 69 people were killed as of Monday, which flooded Zhengzhou and other cities in central China last week. global current Recently, there have been deadly floods in Germany and Belgium, and extreme heat and forest fires in Siberia. The flooding in China also highlights the environmental vulnerabilities that have accompanied the country’s economic boom and may yet undermine it.

There has always been flooding in China, but as Kong Feng, then a professor of public policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Wrote The flooding of cities in China in 2019 is a “general manifestation of urban problems” in the country.

The massive expansion of roads, subways, and railroads in cities that swelled almost overnight has meant that there is less room for rain to be safely absorbed – disrupting what scientists call the natural hydrological cycle.

Faith ChanA geology professor at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, in eastern China, said the country’s cities – and there are 93 It has a modernized population of more than one million at a time when Chinese leaders are making climate resilience a lesser priority than economic growth.

“If they had a chance to build a city again or plan one, I think they would agree to make it more balanced,” said Mr. Chan, a visiting professor at the University’s Water@Leeds Research Institute. of Leeds.

China has already taken some steps to start addressing climate change. Xi Jinping is the country’s first leader to make the issue a national priority.

As early as 2013, Mr. Xi pledged to build an “ecological civilization” in China. “We must achieve harmony between man and nature and pursue sustainable development,” he said. speech in Geneva in 2013

the country has almost five times the green space in their cities over the last twenty years. It has launched a pilot program to create “sponge cities”, including Zhengzhou, which absorb rain better. Last year, Mr. Xi pledged to accelerate reductions in emissions and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. tectonic shift may prove to be one in politics and in practice as well.

The question is whether it’s too late. Even if countries like China and the United States are rapidly cutting greenhouse gases, the warming from those already emitted is likely to have long-term consequences.

Rising sea levels now threaten China coastal metropolisesMore and more severe storms will lash out inland cities like Zhengzhou, which are sometimes sinking under the weight of poorly constructed buildings and infrastructure and hastily planned development.

Even Beijing, which has been attacked fatal The flash flood that killed 79 in 2012, despite the capital’s glittering architectural landmarks that symbolize China’s rising status, still lacks the drainage system needed to siphon the rain from a major storm.

In Zhengzhou, officials described last week’s heavy rains as a 1,000-year-old storm that no planning could prevent.

Even so, why do people new subway system While the waters were constantly rising, the passengers were flooded, trapping the passengers and why “smart tunnel” The city’s third ring road was flooded so quickly that the people in the cars had little time to escape.

The worsening impact of climate change may pose a challenge for the ruling Communist Party, given that political power in China has long been associated with climate change. ability to master natural disasters. A huge surge in public opinion about toxic air pollution in Beijing and other cities a few years ago eventually pushed the government away. act, act.

“As we experience more events like what happened in the last few days, I think the impact of climate change will happen more at the national level and we will think more about what we should do about it,” said Li Shuo. Climate analyst at Greenpeace China.

China’s urbanization has facilitated adaptation in some ways. It has relocated millions of people from rural villages, which have far less defenses against repeated floods. For this reason, the balance sheet of recent flood disasters has been hundreds and thousands, not millions. worst disasters in the history of the country NS.

But Zhengzhou’s experience highlights the scale of the challenges ahead and the limits of easy solutions.

Once a junction south of a bend in the Yellow River, the city has expanded exponentially since China’s economic reforms began more than 40 years ago.

Today, skyscrapers and apartment towers stretch into the distance. The city’s population has doubled since 2001, reaching 12.6 million.

Zhengzhou is flooded so often that residents joke about it sarcastically. “There’s no need to envy cities where you can see the sea,” he said in an online commentary released during a flood in 2011. to report in a local newspaper. “Today we invite you to see the sea in Zhengzhou.”

In 2016, the city was one of 16 selected for a pilot program to expand green space to reduce flooding – the “sponge city” concept.

The idea, not unlike what planners in the United States call “low-impact development,” is to channel water away from dense urban areas into parks and lakes where it can be absorbed and even recycled.

Yu Kongjian, dean of the School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, credit by popularizing the idea in China. In a phone interview, he said that China, which has developed rapidly since the 1980s, has turned to designs from the West that are not suitable for the extremes the country’s climate is currently experiencing. Cities were cemented in, “colonized” by what he called “gray infrastructure”.

In his view, China should “revive and elevate ancient wisdom” by setting aside natural areas for water and greenery, as ancient farmers once did.

As part of the program, Zhengzhou built more than 3,000 miles of new drainage, eliminated 125 flood-prone areas, and created hundreds of acres of new green space. article In Zhengzhou Daily, a state-owned newspaper.

One such area is Diehu Park or Butterfly Lake Park, where weeping willows and camphor trees surround an artificial lake. It just opened last October. It was also submerged last week.

“Sponges absorb water slowly, not fast,” Dai Chuanying, a maintenance worker at the park, said on Friday. “If there’s too much water, the sponge can’t absorb it all.”

Even before last week’s flood, some had questioned the concept. After the city flooded in 2019, China Youth Daily, a party-run newspaper, reported He complained of heavy spending did not lead to significant developments in the projects.

Others stated that sponge cities are not a panacea. They were never designed for heavy rain, as eight inches of rain fell in an hour in Zhengzhou on July 20.

“While the sponge city initiative is an excellent sustainable development approach for stormwater management, it remains controversial whether it can be considered a complete solution to flood risk management in a changing climate,” said Konstantinos Papadikis, Dean of the School of Design. Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Xi’an.

The factories that fuel China’s growth are also pumping out more of the gases that contribute to climate change, while also polluting the air badly. Like countries everywhere, China now faces the task of reducing emissions and preparing for the effects of global warming that seems increasingly inevitable.

Professor Mr. Chan said the issue of climate change in China is not as politically polarizing as, for example, in the United States. This can make it easier to build public support for changes that local and national governments must make, which will often be costly.

“I know for cities, land use issues are expensive but we’re talking about climate change,” he said. “We are talking about future development for the next generation or the next generation.”

Li You contributed to the research.