As China Boomed, It Didn’t Take Climate Change Into Account. Now It Must. - The New York Times

Now those cities face the daunting new challenge of adapting to extreme weather caused by climate change, a possibility that few gave much thought to when the country began its extraordinary economic transformation.

No one weather event can be directly linked to climate change, but the storm that flooded Zhengzhou and other cities in central China last week, killing at least 69 as of Monday, reflects a global trend of extreme weather that has seen deadly flooding recently in Germany and Belgium, and severe heat and wildfires in Siberia.

The flooding in China also highlights the environmental vulnerabilities that accompanied the country’s economic boom and could yet undermine it.

China has always had floods, but as Kong Feng, then a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote in 2019, the flooding of cities across China in recent years is “a general manifestation of urban problems” in the country.

Faith Chan, a professor of geology with the University of Nottingham in Ningbo in eastern China, said the country’s cities — and there are 93 with populations of more than a million — modernized at a time when Chinese leaders made climate resiliency less of a priority than economic growth.

Rising sea levels now threaten China’s coastal metropolises, while increasingly severe storms will batter inland cities that, like Zhengzhou, are sinking under the weight of development that was hastily planned, with buildings and infrastructure that were sometimes shoddily constructed.

The worsening impact of climate change could pose a challenge to the ruling Communist Party, given that political power in China has long been associated with the ability to master natural disasters.

“As we have more and more events like what has happened over the last few days, I do think there will be more national realization of the impact of climate change and more reflection on what we should do about it,” said Li Shuo, a climate analyst with Greenpeace in China.

He said in a telephone interview that in its rapid development since the 1980s, China had turned to designs from the West that were ill-suited for the extremes that the country’s climate was already experiencing.

After the city saw flooding in 2019, the China Youth Daily, a party-run newspaper, lamented that the heavy spending on the projects had not resulted in significant improvements.

Like countries everywhere, China now faces the tasks of reducing emissions and preparing for the effects of global warming that increasingly seem unavoidable.

Chan, the professor, said that in China the issue of climate change has not been as politically polarizing as in, for example, the United States

“I know for cities, the questions of land use are expensive, but we’re talking about climate change,” he said