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

As Beijing enacts a state-led approach to climate adaptation, Washington leans on the private sector and Brussels tries to chart a middle way

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.

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.

“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.