When Typhoon In-Fa landed in China in July 2021, the emergency alarm went on unnoticed. In Zhengzhou, the provincial city of Henan province with a population of 10 million people, citizens were still commuting, and business was running as usual. "The forecast warned about heavy rain, but there was no warning that we should stay home,” one local recalled. It turned out that, within 72 hours, 617.1 mm of rain poured in Zhengzhou, almost the equivalent of its annual average. The city was paralyzed.
“The water reached my chest,” a survivor recalled, after one major subway station in the city was sealed in water, "and the air was running out in the carriage.” This passenger was one of the luckiest, while some other 50 people stuck in the same carriage did not hold on long enough till their first aid. They ran out of time against this crisis, so did the city in its drill for extreme rainfalls.
Like the recent floods in Europe and America, this extreme rainfall came just at the time when scientists home and abroad alarmed us: Anthropogenic climate change is leading to more frequent and intense extreme events. Warmer air and water due to climate change are making precipitation more intense and dangerous. Research has shown that 70% of the extreme weather events and trends analyzed are made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change.
According to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, tropical cyclones (typhoons in this context) will intensify in the Pacific region, leaving millions of people in Asia particularly vulnerable. Large-scale damages due to floods and storms are not novel to China. But the policy actions needed at a scale that would prevent reaching the climate tipping point are still nowhere in sight. Zhengzhou, the transport hub in central China, has adopted urban planning strategies like “sponge city'' to mitigate water scarcity and urban waterlog.
However, this tactic alone cannot mend a broken web when the climate crisis is hitting faster than a sewage system can evolve. The analysis from Climate Action Tracker has revealed that China is highly insufficient in its overall climate commitments. In 2020, China committed itself to achieving climate neutrality by 2060 and updated its NDC targets. Still, with all other countries following their climate ambition, it would lead to a warming of 3 °C globally. Therefore, halting the emission loopholes in national policy is crucial. China needs to adopt more ambitious climate targets to meet its long-term net-zero goal. The highway driving to a carbon-neutral future cannot afford another handful of five-year plans that keep adding more emissions to the atmosphere. The commitments need to boil down to all levels of governance and institutional decision-making. The upper pillar of infrastructure will not stand if the base is flooded and rotten.
Comprehensive guidelines for adaptation and mitigation are imperative for a net-zero transition across all sectors. More extreme rainfalls will be hitting the next decade at a scale foreseeably more intense and causing more fatalities and sufferings. Immediate and long-term investments in climate change mitigation and disaster risk management will be crucial to enhance individual and institutional capacity to respond. Citizens need to be properly informed of climate consequences now. The next flood spares no time for another emergency drill.
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This op-ed piece was written in October 2021, as part of the course assignment to communicate climate science based on IPCC findings during my masters education at Lund University. The targeted readership was the subscribers of China Dialogue.