Climate change challenges authoritarian China

According to a report last year by Climate Central, a US-based research group, the low-lying megacity is, in population terms, the world’s most at risk from rising sea levels.
A two degree Celsius increase in global temperatures would inundate land currently lived on by 11.6 million people, it said – by far the world’s highest. A 4C rise would see that leap to 22.4 million.
The United Nations lists Shanghai among the cities in Asia expected to be most vulnerable to coastal flooding by the 2070s.
“In the past two years we have often seen more than 100 millimetres of rainfall within a single hour, but our city only has the capacity to deal with 36 millimetres,” Zhang Zhenyu, the deputy director of the Shanghai Flood Control Headquarters said, as staff pored over weather data.
“This year with global warming, Shanghai weather has seen a dramatic change.”
The environment has become an increasingly important political issue in China, swathes of which are regularly blanketed by choking pollution, causing widespread public anger.
 Experts point to an overlooked climate change vulnerability – China’s Communist Party-controlled political system.
It can enable authorities to put initiatives into effect on a huge scale once they have been decided on, such as its high-speed rail network, the world’s largest. But officials’ promotion prospects have long been linked to economic growth in their areas, creating “dangerous short-termism” in decision making, according to Cleo Paskal, an energy, environment and resources specialist at British think-tank Chatham House.
As an example, she cited giving permission for toxic chemical containment pools to be built next to areas of high population density along a vulnerable coast.
“Over the long term, especially with environmental change, that is clearly a massive risk, but for the promotion potential of the decision makers concerned, the system registers it as ‘growth’,” she said.
Censorship is another issue, said Li Yifei, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University Shanghai, with environmental research deemed too sensitive risking being banned from publication, and made accessible only to government officials rather than other researchers.
Given the city’s wealth, Shanghai’s communist leaders can deploy huge sums in flood engineering projects, he said, but institutionalised blind spots meant officials focussed on visible threats such as flooding, which could cause public anger and unrest.
More imperceptible problems such as biodiversity risked being ignored, Li said. 
“What’s important to think about is climate change is a problem that affects the entire society, it affects a lot of sectors and certainly way more than levee repairs and drainage,” he said.
Defenders see the Communist authorities’ desire to ensure social stability as motivating them to try to mitigate natural disasters.
“If thousands of ordinary households are flooded and newspapers and television are all at the scene making noise, then the government will face considerable pressure,” said Dai Xingyi, professor of environmental science at Fudan University and a member of the ruling party.
But rules on foreign NGOs in China contributed to Shanghai ranking worse than Dhaka in a 2012 study of nine cities’ vulnerability to flooding published in the journal Natural Hazards.