China Was ‘Unprepared’ For Extreme Rain

After a devastating week of heavy rain and colossal floods, a Chinese Communist Party official did something at a press conference that Chinese officials are rarely known to do in public: He admitted a failing of his government.

In China’s Miyun, where extreme rain and flooding killed at least 31 people at a nursing home, the district’s CCP chief Yu Weiguo told a volley of reporters that his officials had an “inadequate understanding of extreme weather events.” Yu’s rare admission follows a week of intense rain in several parts of China, with resulting floods displacing hundreds of thousands of people, destroying local businesses, disrupting flights and train services, damaging roads and cutting off power and communications.

Officials previously described the situation as a ‘rain trap’, with Beijing alone enduring about a year's worth of rain that fell in less than a week. In the hilly district of Miyun alone, residents were forced to reckon with as much as 573.5 mm rain in the space of a few days. For context, that is nearly as much as the 600 mm of rain the entire city of Beijing receives in an average year.

The result has been harrowing to say the least. "The flood came in an instant, you just had no buffer," one Miyun resident told Reuters. Another 75-year-old resident described to The Guardian how they knew the government had been “caught off-guard”. “We didn’t really receive any specific warning. We didn’t receive any training in confronting the disaster,” he said.

Those descriptions paint a concerning picture, considering China has not only recognised its vulnerability to climate change often, and loudly, but has also allocated a tremendous amount of money to manage disasters. In just June, China set aside nearly $42 million to support local authorities in dealing with natural disasters and carrying out emergency rescue efforts. Earlier in January, state media said Chinese officials had released $734 million in relief funds for people affected by disasters.

But those humongous figures still pale in comparison to the losses China faced from natural disasters in the first six months of the year alone: $7.55 billion. Floods linked to extreme rainfall — which scientists say is a direct effect of climate change — was responsible for more than 90% of those losses.

To add to that, in July, China was forced to reckon with even more disastrous extreme weather than what was seen in the first half. Like Miyun, for instance, Beijing’s neighbouring industrial city Baoding last week received an unprecedented 448.7 mm of rain in just 24 hours — again nearly as much as it sees in a whole year. Across the country, heavy rainfall has caused 13 rivers across seven provinces to swell past their flood warning levels by as much as 1.4 m (4.6 feet), state media say.

And floods are not the only climate challenge China is tackling currently. Many parts of the country are also experiencing a staggering heat wave that’s pushing grids to the limit as air conditioner-fuelled power demand hits record levels. Electricity demand is so high it has broken records four times in July alone. Temperatures have hit new highs since mid-March in the central provinces of Henan and Hubei, Shandong in the east, Sichuan in the southwest, and northwestern Shaanxi and Xinjiang, pushing the national average to the second highest on record.

And authorities expect both flooding and heat waves to intensify through August.

But none of this is new for China, whose officials have been keeping a close eye on the changing patterns of global climates which can directly impact the country’s $2.8 trillion agricultural sector. Government officials have warned, since at least five years ago, that massive flooding has the potential to trigger "black swan" events such as dam collapses.

Each year, extreme weather threatens to wipe out tens of billions of dollars worth of commercial activity, alongside loss of life, as ageing flood defences are overwhelmed and infrastructure gaps — such as limited access to air conditioning — are exposed.

In 2022, the country endured a 79-day heatwave from mid-June to late August — its worst since 1961. A 2023 study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that more than 50,000 heat-related deaths occurred that year.

And that, exactly, is what makes Miyun’s CCP chief’s admission on not knowing enough about extreme weather so concerning — if the world’s second largest economy, with so much at stake, can be caught off-guard, what would it mean for the rest of the world that has often been slow, and even oblivious, to reckon with the dangers of climate change?

Can AI, Carbon Markets Help?

The pain of climate change is not China’s alone, of course. And extreme weather has impacted almost every corner of the world just this week: Heavy rain and thunderstorms have triggered states of emergency across the Northeast United States, while Turkey, Japan and South Korea reported sweltering heat with record-breaking temperatures. At the same time, furious forest fires raged in Spain and France.

Similarly, in June, snow, heavy rain and strong winds ravaged South Africa while a sweltering heat wave made lives miserable in the United Kingdom — which scientists say could become the country’s “new norm”. The climate challenge puts at risk everything from electricity distribution networks to food prices. The World Economic Forum notes that extreme weather events will be long-term risks for Eastern, South-Eastern and Southern Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern America.

But still, the risks are firmly higher for Asia, which houses almost 60% of the world's population. In June, the World Meteorological Organisation noted that Asia was warming nearly twice as fast as the global average. In March, a study commissioned by the charity WaterAid said that South and Southeast Asia face the strongest threat of extreme rain and floods. China's eastern city of Hangzhou and Indonesia's capital of Jakarta topped the list of cities suffering from "climate whiplash", or a rapid succession of prolonged floods and droughts, the study said. Meanwhile, non-profit Germanwatch reported earlier this year that India — one of the countries most at risk from changing climates — has accounted for 10% of global deaths and 4.3% of total economic damage from extreme weather.

It is no surprise then, that India and China have lobbied for trillions for dollars in climate finance from rich countries, with China even stepping in to fill gaps left from Donald Trump-led US withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.

Where geopolitics fails, technology has the potential to bridge the gaps in preparing for climate emergencies. AI, for all its fallacies, can play a significant role in preparing for extreme weather. Chinese scientists say that a model they built using DeepSeek’s large language model had the potential to improve early-warning predictions for natural disasters by 18%.

Google is also looking to leverage its DeepMind AI model to track climate change. Meanwhile, a series of studies have shown that carbon credit markets have the potential to channel private sector finance to climate change mitigation in many emerging markets and developing economies.

The worsening weather phenomenon makes it clear that steps need to be taken to explore every potential with great urgency, especially considering Asia is home to more than half of the world’s labour force and a key player in global supply chains. A crucial example is the semiconductor industry, whose supply chains are linked directly to economies like China and Taiwan and at risk of disruption from both flooding and droughts.

South and Southeast Asia are now also home to some of the biggest data centre investments too. Google, for instance, will invest $6 billion to develop a 1-gigawatt data centre in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. If all goes to plan, that would be Asia’s biggest data centre project. But Andhra Pradesh state is already prone to floods, and received exceptionally heavy rainfall last year.

It is also currently under the threat of fresh floods as you read this. And probably will be next week too. And next month.

• Polysilicon producers in China are in talks to set up a $7 billion fund to buy and shut down a third of the country’s solar panel makers.

• Also, Chinese AI developers have formed an alliance with the country’s top chip firms including Huawei, Biren, and Moore Threads to reduce their dependence on foreign tech.

• India, meanwhile, has overtaken China to become the top exporter of smartphones to the United States.
  

• And Tesla has signed a $4.3 billion deal with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution for energy storage system batteries as US tariffs force the company to to cut its reliance on Chinese imports.