In a race against extreme floods, some cities look to nature

There was just so much water

It was everywhere. We had water pushing up like a geyser. It was just everywhere

Jakarta floods is always happen every year. Usually in the part that you are expected

Even the one that you didn't expect them to have the floods

now have the floods. It was just chaos. It was non-stop rain and we had no contact to anyone for five days pretty much

In my role as a photojournalist, I've been to war zones and I can honestly say that this felt like a war zone on a completely different level

Cities flood. Some more than others. Amid the global climate crisis, floods are now the most common natural disaster

and the concrete jungles that we call cities are particularly vulnerable. Oh my god, I'm feeling like a baby

In the battle to contain trains through rain, one unusual approach stands out

To try and tame flooding, China is using nature to turn cities into sponges

and it's all thanks to one architect. Sponge City is a nature-based solution for climate adaptation

It is about how can we use nature to slow down the flow of water

to regulate water using landscape. This is Professor Kong Zhang-Yu. He's the landscape architect that nurtured the Sponge City revolution in China

To him, all of China's catastrophic floods have the same root cause

modern gray infrastructure is developed based on urbanization beginning actually in in these

countries like london like paris where the climate used to be very mild this infrastructure model

being adapted by other countries like malaysia indonesia and chinese cities and now all these

Why did the city fail? It's simply because it is not invented for this kind of climate

The rain infrastructure just means building with concrete Buildings dams levees roads and pipes cementing the soil underneath and trapping water at the surface We think we can build a stronger pipe system

or we think we can control flood by building bigger reservoirs or stronger dams

But what if suddenly you have some kind of flood which you will never have, you will never have had before

Then you will have a serious disaster. Gong Jiang Yu unsuccessfully lobbied policymakers to invest in sponge cities

Then a disaster struck. 2012, a huge flood in Beijing. 79 people died

And at the same time, some of my project get awarded. and it broadcast in the CCTV news

in Chinese Central Television News. So in 2013, the central government, and President Xi

also says that we need to build a sponge city. It's true

The Chinese government has committed to adding a degree of sponginess to at least 80% of its cities by 2030

And that approach is slowly turning heads in the concrete capitals of the West. The challenge with implementing green infrastructure in older cities like New York versus newer cities that are being built in China is that it is much easier to incorporate these sort of new techniques, new practices when you're building new

New York City's incorporated thousands of these green infrastructure practices over the last seven years

It does still pale in comparison to, you know, how much impervious surface that the city has

Turning a concrete city like New York green is basically a bureaucratic and engineering nightmare

It's just terrible how hard it is to get our act together. There are so many problems that governments have

I think they don't weight this high enough. And we need to make people and cities and nature

much more resilient to the change that's happening and going to keep happening at an accelerating rate

You only have to look at Lismoor, which had the worst flood it's ever had. It was over 14 metres high, and that was because their main solution

is having a levy and the levy was overtopped You need something else You need to think differently about how you protect yourself from these floods which is not just engineering solutions

It all comes down to a simple but costly calculation. How can a city work in tune with nature rather than trying to control it

I think a longer-term solution is a restorative and regenerative one. This is where I think the sponge cities have a real role to play in helping to build resilience

but not necessarily provide a 100% solution for any one of those shocks like a storm or stresses like sea level rise

But as a whole, those nature-based solutions will reduce the exposure because they'll mitigate some of the impacts

Sponge cities are not a universal buffer against extreme weather events. Nor are they intended to be

That's how cities got into this mess in the first place. Copy-pasting the same concrete urban model across the world

with little concern for local climates or biodiversity. The real power of this is not thinking this is a silver bullet

so if we just plant trees, that's the answer. This transformation from a grey palette where it's concrete

to a green palette where it's softer and it's things that grow

It's something that we all have a connection and there's multiple functionality from it

Turning grey cities green is about much more than just managing the water cycle better

It's about adapting to a changing climate while also improving city life

Which brings us to the US-Mexican border and the twin cities of Nogales-Sonora and Nogales-Arizona

The Nogales were founded at the same time, but the two cities experienced floods very differently

The development of the two cities is highly influenced by the border itself

To the point that it's common practice to refer to streets in Mexico as arroyos, which literally means creeks

So in other words, when it rains, the street performs as a creek

Gabriel Diaz Montemayor and Francisco Lara Valencia research ways to bring nature back to the Nogales

The monsoon is experienced completely in a different way. We interview children and we ask them to draw their experience with rain

Most of the kids in Nogales Sonora when they represent the rain they don see water falling from the sky They see water running on the streets And when you see the picture of the kids of Nogales Arizona

they see the rainbow and they see flowers blooming. So it's a completely different experience

It's the same place, the same watershed, the same community separated by the border in a very dramatic way

And it's the most vulnerable communities that tend to live in these flood-prone areas

This multifunctionality is critical to create not only more sustainable ways of handling stormwater, but also creating equity in seas

The sponge city is a solution to solve the problem of climate adaptation, protection of biodiversity and provision of food and energy

At the same time, provide beauty and healthy environment. This is the blueprint for a more resilient future

Working in tune with nature. And yet, very few governments seem interested in replicating China's top-down sponge city policy

Meanwhile, it is undeniable that extreme weather events are making cities from Lismore in Australia to Nogales in Mexico more and more vulnerable

What we're facing is an existential threat to us all. And I don't think we've fully woken up to that yet

If we can't slow down global warming and limit it, it's going to become impossible to survive in some of those locations

And I'm sure some of the policy makers aren't the people who actually have to relocate their homes or relocate their cities

And what we're trying to do is share best practice working with nature

something that both individuals and governments can implement that can help the situation, help us to build resilience

To get there, we have to completely rethink how we build our cities in the face of climate change

Nature already has the answers. We just need to listen