During last month’s deadly floods in Beijing, rural hotel owner Cui Jian and his guests were left stranded on a rooftop overnight. After battling through a metre-high mix of mud and silt, rescuers finally reached them the following day. Beijing’s northern Huairou and neighboring Miyun districts experienced a year’s worth of rain in just one week, triggering flash floods that wiped out entire villages and resulted in 44 deaths—making it the deadliest flood since 2012. The authorities’ most severe weather warning came too late for most villagers in Huairou, who were already asleep when it was issued. Cui, whose 10 properties in the village were submerged after he had spent 35 million yuan ($4.87 million) renovating them, said, “In the past, they closed scenic areas and campsites, evacuated tourists and relocated villagers. If you warn people in time, good, but if not, it’s a natural disaster.”
The floods highlighted weaknesses in the emergency response infrastructure of Beijing’s rural areas, which surround its urban core. They also revealed how Beijing, a city of 22 million with a historically dry climate, is ill-prepared for a wetter future that experts say is coming. Since 2012, the Chinese capital has experienced three major floods that forecasters had previously deemed once-in-a-century events. Climate experts now warn of a growing risk of disasters on a scale previously thought to be unthinkable.
Chinese experts are increasingly urging city planners to prioritize “ecological resilience” in light of the damaging effects of climate change. Zhou Jinfeng, Secretary-General of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, stated, “The current understanding of the climate crisis and its future challenges is insufficient, which naturally leads to insufficient deployment and planning.” China’s ministries of housing and environment, along with the Beijing city government, did not respond to requests for comment.
While two Beijing districts hit hard by the 2023 floods have since issued long-term reconstruction plans that emphasize “climate-adaptive city construction” and include proposals to improve rural flood control and upgrade infrastructure, the vast majority of recently commissioned infrastructure projects in the capital do not prioritize climate adaptation in their plans. A Chinese government database showed that over the past five years, only three Beijing infrastructure projects had procurement tenders that mentioned “ecological resilience.” In contrast, several hundred tenders that mentioned “climate change” were mostly linked to research projects at state scientific institutes in Beijing. According to Zhou, ecological resilience involves measures such as restoring natural riverbanks, reducing the use of concrete and other hard materials, limiting excessive artificial landscaping, and increasing biodiversity.
In a move away from decades of rapid urbanization that fueled China’s economic growth, a high-level urban planning meeting in July stressed the importance of building “liveable, sustainable and resilient” cities. This year, northern China’s rainy season began earlier than any time since records started in 1961, and several Beijing rivers experienced their largest-ever recorded floods. Official data shows that citywide rainfall in June and July surged 75% from the previous year. The director of China’s National Climate Center told the state-owned China Newsweek that this is due to the “significant northward expansion of China’s rain belt since 2011,” which is tied to climate change and marks a shift toward “multiple, long-term, sustained cycles of rainfall” in the traditionally arid north.
‘Sponge Cities’
China’s policymakers have taken some action to combat urban flooding. Since 2015, “sponge city” projects have been underway across the country, transforming concrete-heavy megacities with hidden drainage infrastructure like permeable asphalt pavements, sunken rain gardens, and modernized sewage systems. The concept, which originated in China, is based on a sponge’s ability to absorb and release rainwater. In Beijing, new projects include flood control pumping stations, riverside parks, and man-made lakes. Official data shows that China spent over 2.9 trillion yuan ($403.78 billion) on more than 60,000 “sponge city” infrastructure projects in 2024. Authorities aim to have 80% of urban areas in all cities meet “sponge city” standards by 2030, though many provinces and major cities are behind schedule. According to a Chinese procurement database, new “sponge city” projects in Beijing worth at least 155 million yuan have started this year. Media reports state that currently, 38% of Beijing’s urban areas meet the “sponge city” standards.
However, experts say such initiatives are less effective in Beijing’s rural areas because the mountainous landscape makes villages, which are often built at the foot of steep hillsides and lack emergency response infrastructure, more susceptible to secondary disasters like landslides. Yuan Yuan, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia, noted that current “sponge city” standards rely on historical precipitation data and are not well-equipped to handle extreme rainfall. She added that future plans must also consider preemptively evacuating residents and improving early warning systems, particularly for vulnerable people with limited mobility. In the recent Beijing floods, 31 elderly residents of a nursing home in Miyun were among the dead; they had not been included in evacuation plans and were trapped by the rising waters. Yuan concluded, “It’s necessary to rationally plan the infrastructure needed by local communities and… coordinate risk response plans and countermeasures, to create an integrated system to minimize future losses.”
