00:0064-year-old Ma Guixi had her home destroyed by floods that devastated northern China last month.
00:09The district her villages in, Huairo, and neighboring Miyun district,
00:13just on the outskirts of Beijing, received a year's worth of rain in a single week.
00:18It led to Beijing's deadliest flood since 2012.
00:21Entire villages were mired in mud, and 44 people were killed.
00:26Ma says she's never experienced anything like this all her life, and she's still terrified.
00:37She recalled the chaos after she was rescued, how there was no internet and couldn't contact her children.
00:43Chinese experts are increasingly calling for city planners to prioritize ecological resilience
00:48given the disastrous effects of climate change.
00:51Beijing, situated in a historically dry area in China,
00:55saw citywide rainfall surge by 75% from a year earlier, in June and July.
01:02Since 2012, the Chinese capital has experienced three deluges
01:05that forecasters had said could only happen once every 100 years.
01:10In the recent Beijing floods, the authorities' most serious weather warning came too late
01:15for most villages in Huairo. Many were already asleep by the time it was issued.
01:2131 elderly residents of a nursing home in Miyun were among the dead.
01:26They had not been included in evacuation plans and were trapped in the rising waters.
01:32Yuan Yuan, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia,
01:35says the government needs to face the weaknesses in its rural emergency response.
01:40This time, the rescue work was particularly difficult.
01:47For example, the water flow in the villages was quite rapid.
01:50Compared with the relatively static flooding they are more familiar with in cities,
01:55such as urban waterlogging, they were not well prepared for fast-flowing torrents.
02:00Situations like this show that our current understanding of the impacts of extreme weather,
02:05or the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events under climate change,
02:10as well as the potential risks they bring, has in fact been underestimated.
02:18To fight urban flooding, China spent more than US$400 billion last year to build
02:24quote, sponge city infrastructure projects.
02:27That meant adding permeable asphalt pavements, sunken rain gardens,
02:31and modernized sewage systems to its concrete megacities.
02:36But experts say sponge cities cannot help in Beijing's rural fringes,
02:41as villages in mountainous areas are more vulnerable to secondary disasters,
02:46such as landslides.
02:48Yuan suggests future contingency plans should also include evacuating residents ahead of time,
02:53having better early warning systems,
02:56in particular identify vulnerable groups of people with limited mobility.
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