During the last half of the 20th century, China experienced a period of extraordinary growth and change. In just over 50 years, the country has been transformed from a semi-feudal society dominated by foreign interests to an economic superpower wielding authority throughout the world. A particularly feverish pace of intense urbanization has been underway since the 1980s when the Chinese government instituted a program of economic reforms under the direction of Deng Xiaopeng, Mao Zedong's successor. This ‘fever’ is causing an increasing pace of physical change to the nation's urban landscape. While many industrial cities in western countries developed over a period of two centuries, China's cities have been radically transformed or established in just two decades. This paper frames the socio-economic and political context within which China's urban landscapes are now being modernized; its focus is on the post-Mao transitional period. Through a set of field observations the paper comments upon the effects of international design influences on the nation's urban landscapes. These observations raise important questions concerning the present development of the contemporary Chinese urban fabric. While it is possible to find examples of sensitive and appropriate approaches to the development of urban landscape design supported by enlightened policy-makers, such examples are rare and the norm is a ‘cosmetic’ approach to the formulation and implementation of local planning and design activities. Critical issues are raised and suggestions are made to help curb these activities that are increasingly destroying the ecological, socio-cultural and historic urban fabric of China's cities.

Increasing extreme rainfall and increasingly severe flood disasters worldwide make it essential to enhance flood resilience research and practice. The Sponge City Approach (SCA) has been proposed as a nature-based solution for solving pressing water problems in cities, but there is an urgent need to apply the approach at the broader catchment scale to address the rising challenges driven by climate change. This study established a Sponge Watershed Approach (SWA) using the “Source-Flow-Sink” framework and applied it in the Sishui River Basin in Zhengzhou, China, to reconstruct a town after a heavy rainfall disaster and enhance its resilience to future floods. An integrated modeling approach utilizing hydrologic, hydraulic, and flood-loss curve models was used to analyze and evaluate the flood-reduction effects of different strategies under multiple scenarios. The results show that: (1) a strategy focusing solely on interventions at the source of runoff cannot adequately cope with extreme rainfall, and a whole-system approach to managing floods is necessary instead; (2) the effectiveness of the flow strategy depends on the intervention magnitude and the location where interventions are made; (3) the sink strategy offers the most effective way (approximately 30% decrease in flood loss) to adapt to extreme rainfall; (4) the risk and impact of flood disaster in the town was significantly reduced with the SWA (approximately 35–50% decrease in flood loss) compared to those without any interventions; (5) the effects of these strategies are interactive, and the optimal strategy depends on the rainfall condition. These results demonstrate the practicability of SWA by integrating the source, flow, and sink strategy at the whole-catchment scale, which will help promote natural flood management and enhance the climate resilience of catchments worldwide.

The Yellow River Basin is one of the greatest and most important ecolo...

Water culture is one of the key issues in Water Ecological Civilizatio...

Due to a lack of evaluation of the implementation of water planning policies, based on long-term spatio-temporal analysis, this research uses Beijing as an empirical case study to bridge this gap. We analyze the spatio-temporal evolution of water problems and water planning implementations. Content analysis, cluster analysis, and spatial interpolation analysis are used to illustrate the spatio-temporal evolution of water planning implementation. In addition, a grey relational model is developed to determine the impact of the most relevant implementation objects on each water issue. The results indicate that the Beijing water crisis evolves from the center outwards in a planar expansion. However, the water plan implementation shows linear and point characteristics. The majority of implementation categories consist of single-function infrastructure. The implemented categories ‘which show a significant implementation peak’ influence more than one water issue. The categories ‘that were implemented at a steady rate’ have a high relational grade with both surface and underground water shortage problems. Different implementation types from different planning categories may have simultaneous effects on one kind of water problem. Thus, improving water governance is the key to water security in Beijing. This study may serve as a reference for future water planning in other cities.

The Vatican Climate Summit, titled “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience”, was successfully held in May 2024. A landmark achievement of the Summit was the introduction and adoption of the Planetary Protocol for Climate Change Resilience. This comprehensive framework calls for global cooperation to enhance climate resilience through the implementation of the MAST principles—mitigation, adaptation, and societal transformation, laying the groundwork for a strategic approach to climate action. Facing the current climate challenge, it is also crucial to understand the complexity of climate change, conduct climate design, and promote educational paradigm change for future global leadership in planet stewardship.