A leading Chinese urban planning expert has called on the government to strengthen its adaptive capacity in the face of escalating climate-related disasters, highlighting transformative capacity and coping capacity as the most urgent priorities among core capacities.
Li Xiaojiang, a national engineering survey and design master and former president of the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, made the remarks following a study presented at the annual general meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, a high-level international advisory body for the Chinese government, held on Sept 27-29 in Beijing.
Li serves as the Chinese co-team lead of the CCICED scoping study on building a climate-adaptive society, which developed an assessment framework based on five core capacities for climate resilience: preventive, coping, recovery, transformative and long-term adaptive.
The CCICED study comes as China pursues the goal of basically establishing a climate-adaptive society by 2035. It notes that climate adaptation has become a pillar of national security, sustainable development and public well-being, and recommends making it a mainstream consideration in planning, infrastructure, finance, technology and public governance.
According to the study, coping capacity is defined as the ability to reduce disaster losses following extreme weather events. Transformative capacity refers to the ability of current social, economic and governance systems to proactively transform themselves into new systems with different characteristics when facing expected disaster risks.
Li, a special adviser to CCICED, stressed that climate adaptation is fundamentally different from climate mitigation. While cutting emissions produces global benefits that are relatively easy to measure, adaptation responds to localized hazards whose types, timing, exposure and losses vary sharply across regions.
"There is no universal template for adaptation," Li said. "There can only be lessons that are transferable among regions facing similar types of risks."
For instance, a coastal city may face sea-level rise, storm surges and typhoons, whereas cities in central or northern China are more exposed to extreme rainfall and flooding. Meanwhile, the Chengdu-Chongqing region faces extreme heat, drought and mounting pressure on energy and water systems, he explained.
The CCICED study's case studies examine Shanghai's exposure to sea-level rise, Shenzhen's challenges as a high-density city facing extreme rainfall, the Chengdu-Chongqing region's vulnerability to extreme heat, and the changing risks in arid northern China as some areas experience warming and wetting.
Because of these regional differences, Li emphasized that local assessments are essential. Each region should evaluate its specific climate hazards, infrastructure weaknesses, and adaptive capacity, and then identify the most urgent actions. The study recommends linking climate adaptation capacity assessments with differentiated local strategies.
Li pointed out that "transformative capacity" represents one of China's most important long-term gaps. Beyond repairing damage, transformation requires changing land-use decisions, construction methods and patterns of production and daily life.
In extreme cases, the right choice may be to avoid areas facing unacceptable risks rather than repeatedly rebuilding in harm's way, Li said. He cited the reconstruction of Beichuan county in a different location after the devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province as an example.
"Relocation-based reconstruction should not be undertaken lightly, as it carries enormous costs and far-reaching social implications," Li stressed. "But that, in itself, is a form of transformation. It means not putting people and development back into danger, but proactively changing our approach so that long-term adaptive capacity can be built."
He also emphasized the critical importance of lifeline infrastructure, including power, transport, drainage and emergency systems. Losses during extreme weather events often stem not only from the primary disaster, but from cascading failures such as outages, blocked transport and damage to underground facilities.
The report calls for locally tailored upgrading and retrofitting of infrastructure and lifeline systems, including flood control facilities, energy and communications infrastructure, urban municipal facilities, transport systems, rural production areas and critical underground spaces. It also recommends revising engineering standards for climate resilience.
Li urged policymakers to make full use of the new round of infrastructure investment to raise the quality and disaster resilience of China's built environment. He summarized existing weaknesses as low coverage, low standards in older systems, uneven construction quality and inadequate maintenance.
Although adaptation projects may not always generate strong direct financial returns, Li noted that their national economic benefits are substantial because they prevent damage to lives, property, supply chains and broader economic activity.
Editor：Zhou Jinmiao
