Trial by typhoon shows city's resilience

Global extremes

Shanghai is far from alone in this struggle. Metropolises worldwide face similar climate pressures.

In July 2025, severe rain hit the United States' east coast, with New York's Central Park recording its second-highest hourly rainfall of 50 mm.

Across the UK in January 2024, Storm Henk triggered over 300 flood warnings, landslides and infrastructure submergence.

In August 2024, Super Typhoon Shanshan prompted top-level evacuation warnings for over 5 million people in Japan, leaving hundreds of thousands without power with widespread flight, train and factory shutdowns.

Recognizing these escalating threats, Shanghai is modernizing its architecture through digital and physical measures designed to make the city more able to adapt and resilient.

Under Shanghai's 15th five-year plan for water system governance, the city aims to equip 80 percent of its central urban area with three-to-five-year return period drainage capacity by 2030, while evaluating 10-year or higher design standards for some core zones.

"A 10-year return period doesn't mean an event occurs once every 10 years, but rather that each year has approximately a 10 percent probability," Wu explained.

Urban resilience requires targeted, long-term investment to keep casualties, urban disruption and irreversible losses to a minimum, he said. "Shanghai should adopt risk-based standards: higher for critical facilities like hospitals, transit, underground, utilities, data hubs, and lower for general areas," he said.

The Wusong River project is a cornerstone of this structural defense. As the largest single water conservancy project in Shanghai's history, it focuses on watershed flood discharge and regional drainage.

Once fully operational, it will improve regional flood control as well as ecological protection and inland navigation.

Shanghai is also using its digital intelligent water system to predict and prevent weather events.

The municipality has deployed over 4,300 smart liquid-level and rainfall sensors across 11 districts, creating digital archives for 30,500 kilometers of public drainage pipelines, 43 urban sewage treatment plants and over 1,000 drainage pumping stations.

Alongside digital tools, Shanghai is expanding its green infrastructure through its "sponge city" initiative, which seeks to restore the landscape's natural capacity to absorb, retain and slowly release rainfall.