The Revere

By: David Song

East Asia’s coordinated, science-driven climate-adaptation systems helped limit the impacts of Super-Typhoon Ragasa, showing the contrast between the United States’ disaster preparedness during Hurricane Helene.

Super-Typhoon Ragasa struck East Asia on September 21st, 2025, reaching sustained winds of 165 mph, making it briefly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic. It caused at least 29 deaths, primarily due to flash floods from a barrier lake that broke in Taiwan. Infrastructure and building damages total $1.62 Billion. Climate change is making typhoons stronger; a 2025 study at Imperial College in London found that around 13% of Ragasa’s rainfall and 36% of its damage could be attributable to warming relative to pre-industrial times. Asian governments have recognized that as these storms evolve, so too must policy response. In 2022, the Chinese government published the National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035, with the objectives of establishing robust monitoring systems, risk-assessment practices, reducing city vulnerability, and ensuring public awareness. While it was fortunately less damaging than feared (due to a trajectory which avoided major urban centers), Ragasa was the latest test of East Asia’s climate resilience. Proactive measures such as shutdowns and evacuations, urban storm-proofing, and civilian awareness contributed to reduced damages and fatalities. This article focuses primarily on the adaptation strategies of Hong Kong and China, for which data is most available. 

The Adaptation Strategy 2035 focuses on proactive measures to minimize negative consequences before they occur. In order to improve data collection and prediction accuracy, they aim to invest in scientific pipelines for monitoring and risk assessment. In practice, this entails expanding operations of automatic weather stations and satellites, building computer models to integrate climate change and weather, and attribution analysis of extreme weather to design better preparation methods. More accurate science enables improved urban planning. Hong Kong boasts a massive system of drainage tunnels that intercept hill runoff and redirects it to the sea, as well various underground storm cisterns that can be 60-meter-wide and 30-meter-deep, emptied out by an automated weir system. 

The strategy also emphasizes ministry collaboration with the national government to ensure swift, effective action in the event of disaster. Evacuations and suspensions of infrastructure, school, and transportation are mandated by China’s central government. The Emergency Response Law (2007) establishes unified national leadership, where individual provinces are accountable for the execution of plans in their jurisdictions. The government has established a strong shelter network, with cities opening large venues such as universities and sports stadiums as temporary shelters. Under national coordination, Guangdong authorities evacuated 1.9 million residents from vulnerable areas ahead of typhoon landfall. Trains in Guangdong, the most popular form of long distance transportation, were fully suspended beginning September 24th. Across major cities in East Asia in Guangdong, Hainan, Macao, and Hong Kong, schools, businesses, and transportation were shut down, and citizens were evacuated. The scale and swiftness of these operations demonstrated the efficacy of national systems put in place for disaster preparation. 

Another major pillar of the adaptation program is civilian awareness. Hong Kong began to issue warning signals when the typhoon was still over a thousand km away, escalating them as it neared and strengthened. In China, a Level I warning was issued, the highest in its four-tier system. The Emergency Early Warning Release system reaches citizens via multiple avenues which have been standardized since 2015: alerts via websites, apps, SMS, WeChat, loudspeakers, and electronic displays.

America’s disaster response system is lackluster in comparison. Hurricane Helene made landfall in September 2024 near Perry, Florida as a Category 4 hurricane. Superficially, it was weaker than Ragasa, yet it resulted in over 250 deaths and direct property damages totalling $79 billion. It struck particularly hard in North Caroline, where flooding from thirty inches of rain destroyed homes, stranded civilians, and caused 460,000 outages. The extent of government action varied with state: in Florida, about 105,000 people left for outside the storm zone in the four days before landfall, based on anonymized cellphone mobility data analyzed by The Washington Post. In inland North Carolina, many areas had no flood-evacuation plans and minimal warnings; movement of people barely changed in the 16 hardest-hit counties before the floods. 

The lack of a nationwide playbook for evacuation and preparation exacerbated Helene’s devastation, and it is indicative of a broader concern in America’s current political climate. While science is continually improving, our government refuses to establish nationwide systems for improved monitoring and regulated action. Public awareness too is at an all time low, worsened by dismissive rhetoric. Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at a UN convention this year. Once at the center of American media just a few years ago, climate change seems now to have fallen into the American’s distant memory. In this time when resilience depends on building systems that can adapt as fast as the climate changes, our nation seems to be content with staying still.