Dai Guowen

After decades of rapid urbanization at the cost of environment, China has become one of the countries that value sustainable development and climate adaptation in national agenda. The namely ’Ecological Civilization’ and ‘Green Development’ evolved from political vision to more pragmatic strategies. The presentation will give an overview picture of Chinese governments’ policies on water management, national and local level, pursuing ‘a more beautiful China’. Those are operationalized into actions through dedicated institutional arrangement among differentiated actors. Moreover, international cooperation with European cities, such as EC-LINK (Europe-China Eco-Cities Link Project, EU funded), has played unique role in introducing concepts, cutting-edge technologies and policies. Case of ‘sponge city’, the nature-based solution term in Chinese context, will illustrate more vivid details.