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In Focus | As natural disasters rage, does China’s ‘top-down’ climate model provide a way forward?

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A punishing drought is draining Europe’s great rivers, pushing the Loire, the Danube and the Rhine towards record lows. At the Kaub gauging station, the reference point for shipping on the Rhine – Germany’s economic artery – the water level fell to 17cm (6.7 inches) this month, a low unseen since measurements began in 1880.

Meanwhile, wildfires are burning across southern Europe, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands and producing the defining image of a European summer in which disaster has come to feel as seasonal as the holidays.

But this is not a story unique to any one continent or hemisphere. In recent weeks, smoke from intensified Canadian wildfires drifted down the American east coast, leaving New Yorkers struggling to breathe, while China has battled a prolonged heatwave and persistent floods while bracing for what could be the strongest El Nino cycle in the past 150 years.

The cascade of crises has revived an old question: how should societies adapt to a rapidly changing climate? It is one the world’s three leading economies are answering very differently.
The results, analysts warn, are just as disparate. China’s government can set long-term plans and back them with public money and strong execution. The United States leans heavily on its private sector, with little public effort to match. Europe sits uneasily between the two: its public institutions short of long-term vision and money, its private sector short of awareness.

“Compared with the Western system, China’s greatest advantage in these areas is its very strong capacity for top-down implementation. That is the root of all of this,” said Jiangwen Guo, a senior research fellow in the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House.

Governments everywhere face the same three challenges on climate adaptation, according to Guo.

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