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Unlike its Western counterparts, though, China’s climate change policies have since the early 2000s accorded greater priority to adaptation than to mitigation. Consequently, its key mitigation targets, to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, are not very ambitious given its ability to focus resources and centralize decisionmaking and implementation.

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Behind this feel-good terminology is a series of adaptation plans, policies, and projects that are startling in their scope and objectives. As Freymann details, these efforts include “constructing the largest water transfer system in human history; expanding and raising nearly 6,000 miles of sea walls along its coasts; building a strategic grain reserve larger than the rest of the world’s combined; carving wetland flood basins in the centers of its largest cities; restoring coastal wetlands to act as buffers against storms; and relocating hundreds of thousands of ‘ecological migrants’ in low-lying areas.”