It's raining again in China.
None of us like the rain,but here it's gone from mild annoyance to a serious problem.
Once a largely rural country,China now has more than 100 cities with populations of over a million people - and all that building on former farmland has led to a major downside - flooding But instead of constructing big barriers like others have done, China is turning back to nature for the solution,upgrading its cities so that they welcome the water rather than hold it back.
Get yourself comfortable and prepare to soak-up China's sponge cities.
China is home to more large cities than any other nation.
60% of its 1.4BN citizens now reside in urban areas and creating the space for them to live, work and play has meant replacing huge areas of green space with sprawling buildings and infrastructure.
That's a lot of land that would previously have absorbed rainwater being replaced with surfaces that do the opposite - and all in a country that regularly experiences heavy storms. Little surprise then that flooding has become such a serious problem - even in places with good drainage.
In 2020,over just two months,more than 400 rivers flooded across China - many of them worse than ever before - and at least 50 million people were impacted.
On top of that,water shortages are occurring in some cities where water runs off the streets too quickly to enter water systems that are already overstretched.
The response from China's government was to mop up this mess and convert many of these areas into so-called sponge cities.
