Extreme green: How China and Germany manoeuvre through climate extremes

26 October 2021

Over the past summer, we have experienced several extreme weather events across the globe. The European floods of July 2021 affected five federal states in Germany. The western state of Rhineland-Palatinate was hit hard, with 141 people confirmed dead and more than 700 injured. The water swept away several houses, schools, over 60 bridges and entire stretches of land, as has been vividly captured by aerial image recordings. The current economic damage is estimated to be between USD 17.7 to 23.6 billion. In China’s central Henan Province, extreme downpours severely affected the city of Zhengzhou.

What became known as the ‘July 20’ event left 292 dead, caused a direct economic loss of USD 17.6 billion and traumatised parts of the 10 million population. Extreme flooding triggered massive landslides and submerged the underground rail system, leaving many trapped in subway tunnels. Further, the impacts for Henan as an agricultural province are severe, as it accounts for one-third of China’s wheat supply. The floods have affected 972,100 hectares of farmland (which equate to roughly 1361 soccer fields) and can disrupt the national food supply and Chinese livelihoods.

*China (Henan Province) heavy rainfall and floods, source: ECHO, European Commission. Image credit:* *Wikimedia*.

These recent events expose our globally intensified climate vulnerability and the growing necessity of learning how to adapt to the climate change that is already occurring. They also make visible how deeply human vulnerability to climate change is entangled with our routines, cultural customs, and nature-society relations. These structures are the preconditions with which we (can) respond to extreme weather events. The widespread practice of sealing land to further urban development has become a prominent example in recent conversations. At the same time, this practice also demonstrates how vulnerability is a result of the political economy: government policies and dominant economic systems set important parameters for (local) livelihoods, e.g., in terms of urban planning, housing, and private property regulations. Simultaneously, the state plays a vital role in facilitating responses to complex problems, which involve many different actors.

Comparing how governments in different political systems respond to the pressing political challenges of climate change, the need for improved policy integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction becomes obvious. Yet, the coordination of different government actors from these two sectors does not occur readily. Further, governments across the globe have concentrated their efforts on infrastructural solutions and green planning. Germany and China are two examples where this can be observed. In both contexts, strengthening community capacity to enhance self-reliance will be an important complementary measure to existing policies. To do so, more social scientific research and investigations of what role governments can take to enhance community-led adaptations are needed.

Manoeuvring through climate extremes from a disaster perspective

Politically, Germany and China have manoeuvred differently through the recent disasters, although some core similarities can be detected. In China, the flood quickly became a high-level political concern, with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang mobilising flood prevention and disaster relief measures to the disaster-struck province. The management of catastrophic risk is clearly stipulated and well-regulated in China’s experienced disaster management system.

One crucial element is the “Whole-Nation-System” (juguo tizhi), which is not only considered a coping mechanism to deploy and allocate national resources, but also a much larger political ideology to deal with challenges of larger magnitude. Under the central government’s coordination and organisation, it emphasises unified leadership and an integrated response involving different ministries. Depending on the type of disaster, different governmental agencies oversee the disaster response. The central government pools resources and uses intergovernmental transfers from other provincial governments and departments to support local disaster management of affected regions. The subnational governments’ reliance on centralised assistance has been a much-debated concern in China’s handling of disaster responses. Like in Germany, the political response to the recent floods is currently under investigation by the Ministry of Emergency Management in China. To what extent government agencies should have and could have reacted differently is a core question in both countries.

In Germany, the extreme floods also received high-level political attention, with several politicians, including Chancellor Merkel, rushing to the spot. In the run-up to the federal elections of late September, the federal and state governments agreed on a reconstruction fund of approximately USD 30 billion as part of the 2021 Reconstruction Aid Act. The extreme flood has also rekindled previous debates on the reform of the German Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK). Against a backdrop of early warnings Germany had received through the European Flood Awareness System, which included precise forecasts of extreme flooding and maps, the high death toll was harshly criticised as a monumental failure of the system.

Debates are ongoing as to whether the BBK requires an amendment of the German Constitution to — among other things — improve foresight and foster better intertwinement of federal and state competencies. In this context, China’s risk reduction efforts are considerably more advanced and the coordination of different governmental agencies is more proven in light of China’s longstanding experience with disaster events. But unfortunately, this type of policy integration ends at the doorstep of climate adaptation.

In both cases, a greater need for improved policy integration of disaster risk reduction efforts and climate adaptation has become obvious. In contrast to the well-established and experienced policy area of disaster risk management and reduction, climate change adaptation is relatively new on the political agenda. Climate change adaptation refers to adjustments of different systems (e.g., ecological, social, economic, political) to actual or expected climatic stimuli. In the sense of adjusting political systems, its goal is to improve the adaptive capacity of governments and populations to deal with intensified climate vulnerability. Disaster risk reduction has a similar goal: it intends to reduce the negative effect of (climate-sensitive) natural hazards on people by understanding and avoiding the emergence of (new) risks.

In political practice, integration of disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation is yet to happen. In Germany, the reignited discussion on BBK reform has occurred relatively separately from recent debates over a German Climate Adaptation law. It was only in July 2021 that the German Environment Agency (UBA) issued recommendations for the establishment of climate adaptation as a new and mandatory public task (“Gemeinschaftsaufgabe”). Until then, climate adaptation had been a largely voluntary and local task administered by state governments and municipalities.

China’s strategising on climate change adaptation

China has undertaken several policy efforts in the past decade. In 2013, the then political body in charge of climate policy, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), published a macro-policy framework on adaptation. In 2016, NDRC launched 28 urban adaptation pilots. In 2019, China embraced “the urgent need for climate adaptation by joining forces with the Netherlands” to establish a Global Center on Adaptation Office in Beijing. In October 2020, the Ministry of the Environment and Ecology (MEE) announced the compiling of a National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035.

However, besides these recent engagements and a strong focus on policy sectors such as water and forests, political action remains sporadic and awareness about the need to support populations and policy sectors such as public health is low. As part of China’s existing adaptation efforts, focus is being put on nature-based solutions to adapt to a changing climate as part of the ecological civilisation narrative. One popular example is China’s launch of the sponge city framework, which was first piloted in 2015. Sponge city programmes aim to deal with flooding ecologically by creating nature-based solutions and permeable structures that can absorb higher amounts of water.

*Flood-resilient landscape of sponge-city pilot Jinhua. Image credit: Kindly provided by landscape architectural firm Turenscape and Kongjian Yu.*

The concept of creating urban sponges through inviting water into the cities based upon permeable landscape adjustments has been front and centre in the context of urban adaptation research and practice worldwide. China has been leading some of these efforts with a prolonged piloting phase after which it issued national guidance on sponge city construction in 2014 and formally launched the Chinese sponge city programme in 2015. In 2017 alone, the construction of 658 sponge cities started. Researchers and practitioners alike consider these new landscapes a more sustainable and transformative approach than earlier measures that intended to keep water away and out of the cities. Sponge city planning is also a hot topic in governmental exchanges on urban resilience practices. Examples include the Sino-Dutch collaboration on new concepts for urban water management. In light of the recent catastrophic floods in Belgium, China, and Germany, sponge cities were once again touted as a “paradigm shift” away from grey infrastructure in municipalities such as Berlin.

Yet, lately, the strong focus on large-scale blue-green infrastructure and often resource-intensive planning measures has also come under question. Zhengzhou is a designated sponge city, but in July it simply received too much rain for the innovative landscape construction to handle. The sponge city was simply not built to withstand “both the peak rate of precipitation and total rainfall amount”, which exceeded the one-hundred-year level. This illustrates the urgency of climate extremes and of finding all-encompassing solutions. The standalone focus on infrastructural and technological solutions will not suffice to cope with the climatic changes underway. Rather, research on climate change adaptation has emphasised the need to investigate how people and local communities are affected differently; how they choose to adapt; what possibilities they have; and how governments can support community-based as well as household-level adaptations. But so far, policy-makers have neglected the social science perspective of climate change impacts and adaptation.

Strengthening the social scientific perspective and learning how communities (can) adapt

We know from the most recent scientific evidence and the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we will reach the expected warming of 1.5°C earlier than expected. With higher degrees of warming, the occurrence of combined weather extremes becomes more likely. Extreme heat, drought and precipitation are more likely to happen simultaneously, and in some parts of the globe more than in others. As a result, we must adjust to more severe climatic extremes sooner rather than later.

Coping with existing and future climate change will require a wide range of (policy) efforts across different time scales, including long-term planned infrastructural responses, efforts from within communities, as well as ad-hoc emergency measures. But there is a chance to complement these with forward-looking social adaptation strategies in the future. There lies a great opportunity in researching and thinking about how we want to live as a community in the time to come and collectively formulating responses to strengthen community capacity. This requires research efforts such as examining how communities are (already) coping with extreme events and to what extent they (can) collectively adjust their routines to climatic extremes. It also includes looking at how the state can support self-provisioning and community-based adaptation efforts before disasters strike. The overly strong reliance on governmental interventions in reaction to events is not enough preparation for intensifying climate change.

Enhancing our understanding of the social dimension of adaptation is important across different political systems. This includes, first, looking at how people are affected differently and how adaptation responses could be tailored to meet the demands of certain groups (e.g., flood preparedness programmes for disabled people). Second, we must understand how social routines and changed daily practices interrelate with population vulnerability, how they can foster resilience and be supported by state institutions (e.g., flexible adjustment of working hours and clothes during periods of extreme heat). Third, we should consider how the state is co-creating some of the vulnerabilities, e.g., by only representing selected interests or due to an underfunded and overburdened health sector. Finally, we should co-create local adaptation strategies together with local populations to also boost awareness about the matter. Strengthening the perspective of how society already adapts and can adapt in the future will hopefully make us less helpless and better prepared.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Dr Julia Teebken is a political and social scientist comparatively researching (political) strategies in the context of climate change adaptation and social vulnerability. She is currently a research associate at the Environmental Policy Research Centre (FFU) of the Freie Universität Berlin. Image credit: Flickr/Sino-German Urbanisation Partnership (main image).