In July 2025, a nature education centre was running summer camps in rural Beijing when heavy rain hit. Landslides and power cuts ensued, trapping staff and children on the site in Miyun district.
Rather than sit and wait for help, the staff formed an emergency-response team to monitor water levels and assess evacuation routes. Finding nothing promising, they borrowed a small pump from villagers to draw drinking water from a well, which before long they were able to power with solar energy. With their wood-burning stoves coming in handy at mealtimes, they then simply waited a few days until mains power and transportation were restored.
This management of the crisis impressed Zheng Yan, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Research Institute for Eco-civilization, who heard the story and paid the centre a visit. Rather than turn to the government for help, they immediately started to organise themselves,” says Zheng Yan, who helped write China’s latest national climate adaptation strategy. Soon after the flood, they managed to install solar panels with the help of a solar energy company, becoming the first in the village to get power back. Their response to the flooding reflects how Chinese communities’ self-organising is coming to play a more important role in the response to climate risks and impacts.
China’s latest climate action plan under the Paris Agreement, published in September, stated that a “climate-adapted society” will be mostly in place by 2035. But currently, Chinese people who are experiencing the effects of climate change have limited ways to get involved in climate adaptation, experts have told Dialogue Earth.
Direct participation
China published its first national adaptation strategy in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2022 that “public participation” was included as a policy goal, in the revised strategy.
Shiran Victoria Shen, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, told Dialogue Earth that “climate mitigation can be managed through top-down planning and industrial regulation, but adaptation is more urgent and grounded in local realities. To be effective, it must involve meaningful public participation”.
So, how can ordinary citizens get involved? Her latest paper, published in Communications Earth & Environment, examines China’s largest government-run petition platform, known as the “Local Leaders’ Message Board”. Its name refers to the officials it is hoped will be influenced by it.
Members of the public use the system, which was launched in 2008 and now covers nearly all of China’s provincial-level regions, to flag local governance issues, request assistance or submit policy suggestions. Although designed for a wide range of policy topics, it has increasingly become a channel for citizens to express concerns about climate-related risks, especially following extreme-weather events.
In July 2021, Henan suffered catastrophic floods after days of heavy downpours. Tragically, 398 people died or went missing and nearly 14 million were affected, Shen’s report recounts. Shen analysed all messages submitted to the message board from 1 January to 4 October of that year. Prior to the flood, there were virtually no public messages in Henan about flood adaptation. Afterwards, there was a sharp and sustained increase in petitions calling for improved drainage, infrastructure upgrades and neighbourhood safety. “These messages weren’t framed in climate terms, but in practice they reflected demands for adaptation,” she says.
Shen notes that, unlike social media posts, which often reflect personal sentiment or public opinion, messages on the government-run platform tend to be formal appeals directed at state authorities. The message board provides a structured channel for citizens to articulate specific requests related to governance and public safety, she says.
Henan’s disaster triggered responses from residents in other parts of China, Shen’s research found. Between 17 July and 4 October, 67 adaptation-related petitions were submitted outside Henan, 13 of which referenced the province.
One petitioner in Chengdu wrote: “During the summer, Chengdu is prone to heavy rainstorms. I would like to inquire if Chengdu Metro has any safety measures in place to handle extreme weather events, such as flooding of metro tunnels similar to the recent rainstorm and flood in Zhengzhou [Henan’s capital]?”
Shen explained that, when submitting a message, users choose a topic category and designate a government department to receive the petition, which is then expected to issue a public response. Her ongoing research will examine not only how local governments respond on the platform, but also whether repeated or coordinated public appeals eventually influence formal climate adaptation policies.
In any case, mechanisms for participation shouldn’t be limited to leaving online feedback, Shen says. Communities should have other opportunities to influence policy too.
Community power
While the message board demonstrates growing climate awareness and reactive participation in the wake of disasters, effective adaptation also relies on proactive engagement beforehand. This is where NGOs and student volunteer groups offer an alternative approach. Their work focuses on long-term capacity building, strengthening local knowledge and supporting communities to shape their own priorities. Policy may occasionally be influenced by these efforts, but the more immediate impact is on the community itself. People begin organising collectively, planning for emergencies and developing strategies that may endure regardless of external assistance.
Last year, Lü Hangzhou, a postgraduate student of environment and geography at Peking University, brought together student groups and local community organisations to carry out a study of climate-risk assessment and local knowledge in provinces where they already had connections with local NGOs, like Yunnan, Jiangxi and Shaanxi.
The students gathered and organised data, while the NGOs helped reach out to local communities and get them involved. After the study, findings were fed back to the NGOs, some of whom have used the findings to inform their local-level adaptation, for example by repairing flood defences, creating mutual-aid networks and stockpiling emergency supplies.
Lü Hangzhou helped write a guide for assessing climate risks in China’s rural areas, sponsored by the Yunnan United Charity Support Centre, an NGO. He also helped create training materials for people carrying out such assessments. Initially, the training workshops were only open to NGOs. But it turned out those organisations lacked the necessary personnel and skills in IT and data analysis. Student volunteer groups, though, can help fill that gap.
The students live on site for a week or two, carrying out field studies. And as long as they’re not too busy in the fields, the locals are always happy to talk. “If they’re having a rest or there’s nothing to do, they’re keen to chat, to share stories,” or even to invite the students to their homes, says Lü. Many of the student teams share their experiences on social media, combining climate action with public communications.
Lü’s role is to provide guidance online when needed. He says that, even at a distance, he “can see how the students are getting involved locally, getting to know the area – and that’s one of our ideal outcomes”.
The studies aren’t just a matter of simply handing out questionnaires. Group discussions are held. Locals might, for example, sit around a village map and work together to mark rivers, crop distribution and areas prone to flooding or drying out. Such “resource mapping” helps make climate risks visible.
They also draw up agricultural calendars, noting the times various agricultural tasks need to be completed, and discussing how climate change has disrupted those rhythms. This kind of participation allows local people to talk about their own experiences, identifying issues and possible responses.
The team also brings in climate data, analysing changes in precipitation and temperature, and comparing it with the experiences reported by locals. The final report includes scientific data analysis alongside the villagers’ local knowledge and suggestions.
“A lot of the solutions are things outside experts wouldn’t come up with, which take shape during discussions between the locals,” says Lü. The student groups and the NGOs create platforms for communication between locals on these issues, which allows the community to realise its potential to address climate change, Lü adds.
Some of that ends up as feedback to the government, in the form of policy suggestions. One village head in Jiangxi, for example, adjusted the local drainage systems in response to findings from the project.
The most important outcomes, Lü says, happen within the communities. Some villages have set up buddy systems to ensure elders have help from someone younger when needed, and also produced safety guidance for older people for when extreme weather hits.
In dry areas, NGOs are helping households set up emergency water storage. “We don’t want to see the public sitting and waiting for government to make improvements. We want communities to find their own responses,” says Lü.
Innovating to meet challenges
While communities around the country are taking some action, getting the public to work on climate adaptation at scale and systematically will be a challenge. Three things are needed for more bottom-up adaptation, says Zheng Yan. These are a stable policy foundation, reliable funding as well as innovative and self-sustaining NGOs.
The most immediate limitation is resources. Lü says he is still popularising his “NGO + student volunteers” model, but admits: “We were very short of funds last year, and a lot of students had to pay their own travel expenses up front.” NGOs are in a similar plight and among the organisations Lü spoke to, there’s agreement that everyone is short of money.
Projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, known as climate mitigation, have always been better funded than climate adaptation. This is partly because mitigation is more easily quantified and assessed. For example, a solar project can claim its electricity generation has avoided X tonnes of CO2 emissions that would have otherwise been emitted from coal-fired power generation.
According to a 2021 report from the Climate Policy Initiative, a think-tank headquartered in the United States, sectors with mitigation benefits received 60% of China’s “green” or “climate” funding in 2017-18, or CNY 1.3 trillion (USD 193 billion). Over half of that sum went to the wind and solar power sectors. Adaptation-related projects received only CNY 56 billion (USD 8.3 billion), or 4% of all climate funding. The remainder went to activities with indirect mitigation and adaptation benefits such as “resource conservation” and “ecological construction”.
NGOs working on climate can find themselves unsure where to start. Foodthink, a non-profit focused on sustainable food and agriculture research, recently published a report on how rural NGOs can help respond to climate change. It explained how organisations sometimes arrive with climate funding in villages, only to find that the root of local problems are issues of livelihoods, infrastructure, healthcare and an aging population. This creates a challenge: the NGOs want to work on climate issues, but find themselves forced to rethink and tackle more basic problems.
Despite the many challenges, Zheng Yan thinks climate adaptation is an opportunity for NGOs to innovate. She says some foundations and charitable organisations are experimenting with new approaches. Rather than asking the NGOs they fund to “change track” to climate adaptation, they guide them towards inserting climate resilience into their existing work on education, health, agriculture and disaster response.
She stresses that China has already built a good policy framework for climate adaption, and gives equal emphasis to both mitigation and adaptation at the policy framework level. But at the community level, external aid will not play the long-lasting role that local forces can. “Whether it’s volunteer groups of mothers or young people, or community foundations – those are the real future of adaptation,” she says.
