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Xiaofei Xu

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 green transition is no longer something [China] needs external pressure to pursue. It’s a basic national development strategy
Jiangwen Guo, Chatham House
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,” said Jiangwen Guo, a senior research fellow in the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House.
“That is the root of all of this.”
Governments everywhere face the same three challenges on climate adaptation, according to Guo.

The first is that adaptation is hard to quantify. Cutting emissions produces a number, so investors can see what their money bought; protecting a city against future heat does not, and public attention fades with the weather.
Each heatwave, wildfire or flood in Europe makes the threat feel real, she said, and once it passes, the scar is easily forgotten.
The second is that risk is intensely local, which makes region-by-region risk assessment an indispensable first step. China’s 2035 adaptation strategy, published in 2022, devotes a full chapter to it, an advance on its predecessors.
The third is that adaptation cuts across regions, industries and government departments, making coordination extremely difficult, especially when it is already a lower priority for many.
China faces all three, Guo said, but was likely to implement solutions better than most, with the central government recognising the need for climate adaptation and willing to invest in it.
“Across China, the green transition is no longer something the country needs external pressure to pursue. It’s a basic national development strategy,” she said.
That strategy carries benefits as well as drawbacks. China’s rapid production of solar panels, for instance, brought prices down and encouraged widespread adoption – but the abundant supply has proven difficult to stem, with fierce intra-industry competition driving down prices and leading the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to deem the phenomenon an issue that must be “comprehensively addressed”.
European analysts said crucial elements were missing from the continent’s efforts to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.
“The economic and political mindset of our current leaders tends towards letting the market decide rather than planning for the long term,” said Clement Caudron, a project lead at The Shift Project, a Paris-based climate think tank.
France was not putting enough resources into its climate efforts, while the absence of a long-term vision and sufficient, stable public funding made it hard for businesses and ordinary people to plan ahead, according to Caudron.


Budget constraints were also limiting the government’s ability to launch major public investment programmes in strategic sectors, Caudron explained. Climate, he said, was often among the first items to be sacrificed in budget negotiations.
The Fonds Vert (Green Fund), a French government fund created in August 2022 after a summer of heatwaves to help local authorities pay for environmental infrastructure – including climate adaptation – has seen the money available for new projects fall from €2.5 billion (US$2.9 billion) in 2024 to €1.15 billion in 2025, and €837 million in this year’s budget.
“Exceptions do get made in major crises – during Covid, we allowed ourselves to spend public money to support the economy and stave off a collapse – which proves we can do it when we want to,” Caudron said.
“But for the climate, the emergency is evidently not deemed sufficient to justify the same.”
Similar challenges were present at the EU level, according to Antoine Oger, executive director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy think tank.
He said climate adaptation required systematic efforts and significant investment in near-term budgets, but the effects might only be felt in the long term, which are not in sync with politicians’ short-term mandates.
“For them it’s not particularly enticing to make some decisions that will have impact in 20 years from now, from a purely political perspective,” he said.
The EU also struggles with its complex governance system that makes the massive, coordinated effort necessary for harmonised climate adaptation policies difficult, according to Oger.
Where Brussels is hemmed in by electoral cycles and shared competences, Beijing can plan in decades, Oger said, crediting this area as one where China’s system had the edge.

“There are, of course, different governance layers in China, but this is a much more integrated system to deal with this sort of long-term change … The five-year planning is much better than an electoral cycle, from a governance perspective,” he said.
Oger said he was not arguing for the EU to adopt China’s model, which had problems of its own. But, he added, a system built around a stable, coherent and long-term outlook was better equipped for a slow-moving, systemic challenge like climate change. “That is just a fact.”
The EU also lags on private-sector awareness, an area where the United States offers a model, according to Thibault Laconde, founder of Callendar, a French firm that helps companies adapt to climate change.
Since the Los Angeles fires and a run of severe droughts, many American companies have moved to protect themselves against future extreme weather, he said. Corporate awareness, in his view, may matter more for adaptation than public awareness did.
“If you’re a company, you do not need an incentive to do it. It’s in your own interest to make sure your factory or your infrastructure can keep operating reliably,” Laconde said.
But the private sector-driven model in the US also had its own limitations – in particular, a lack of “patient capital” provided by the government – to help companies overcome their short-term impulses in their long-term investments, according to Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute.
The United States still did not have a national plan for climate adaptation, and most states lacked one too, wrote Madison Condon, a professor at Boston University School of Law, in a report published by the institute in July. Both China and the EU have adopted blueprints.
And there are some gaps in this realm the private sector cannot fill. When Washington moved to dismantle the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, American insurance actuaries formally objected, Condon noted, arguing the centre’s continuity was “not only a scientific necessity, but an economic one” for an industry that depended on its data to price climate risk.
Even in those areas where commercial providers present alternatives, opting for the private-sector option carries risks.




The US state of Connecticut licensed climate-risk scores from a private firm, an approach Condon warned left the government endorsing black-box models whose inputs and methodology it did not control, adding that publicly maintained models could serve as a check on private-sector data.
Regardless of the system, the increasing urgency of the need for climate adaptation is clear, and the costs of inaction are climbing, according to the UN Environment Programme.
Climate-related extreme events cost the world an estimated US$140 billion a year between 2000 and 2019, per the programme’s latest Adaptation Gap Report, an annual figure projected to reach between US$1.7 trillion and US$3.1 trillion by 2050, depending on how much the planet warms.
“Budgets may be tight. There may be many competing priorities. But the smart choice is to invest in adaptation now,” wrote the programme’s executive director Inger Andersen in the report, “to minimise loss of life, to soften damage to infrastructure and, ultimately, to protect economies from the stronger climate impacts that are approaching over the horizon”.


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People swim near a sunken German warship from World War II, exposed due to low Danube River levels caused by drought and extreme heat, in Prahovo, Serbia in July. Photo: Reuters

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


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


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}As Beijing enacts a state-led approach to climate adaptation, Washington leans on the private sector and Brussels tries to chart a middle way

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