Are China’s earthquake-prone regions ready for the double threat of seismic disasters and climate change?
On January 1, 2025, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck near Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, displacing over 120,000 people and devastating eight villages. Reconstruction began on March 3.
This disaster highlights a troubling trend: climate change is worsening seismic risks. Rising temperatures destabilize permafrost and glaciers, increasing landslide threats and jeopardizing vulnerable infrastructure. Tibet’s fragile geology along the Himalayan seismic belt makes it especially susceptible to these dangers.
The costs are staggering. China faces a growing toll from climate-driven natural disasters. In the first half of 2024 alone, natural disasters caused China enormous direct economic losses of 93.16 billion yuan.
The January 2025 disaster serves as a painful reminder of past tragedies, like the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed 87,000 and caused US$150 billion in damages.
Post-disaster rebuilding often consumes 5 to 7 percent of annual GDP in affected regions, pushing rural households below the poverty line. These staggering costs highlight the urgent need for climate-resilient rebuilding strategies to protect vulnerable communities from future disasters.
Some steps have already been taken to address these concerns. Nationally, the country’s Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035 emphasizes green infrastructure and smart early-warning systems, aiming to cut climate-related economic losses by 2025. At the local level, Tibet’s Ecological Security Barrier” initiative has driven 6 million hectares in reforestation since 2016, thereby reducing landslide risks by 20 percent.
More can be done. As climate-driven disasters escalate, these efforts must scale to match the Himalayan region’s increasing seismic and climate threats.
Firstly, an owner-driven reconstruction model should be prioritized to empower households, as seen in other earthquake-prone regions. For instance, after Nepal’s Gorkha earthquake in 2015, the National Reconstruction Authority launched the Earthquake Housing Reconstruction Project. From 2015 to 2020, it rebuilt 211,985 homes through grants and generated US$3.76 billion, thereby revitalizing local economies. The program also promoted increased financial inclusion, with 70 percent of beneficiaries accessing formal banking for the first time, 30 percent of whom were women.
Secondly, strengthening resilience involves adopting the latest building codes for new construction and retrofitting existing buildings across Tibet. The benefits are significant. According to research from the National Institute of Building Sciences, every US$1 invested in resilient buildings can save between US$4 and US$11 in recovery costs, reinforcing the fiscal prudence of such measures.
For older buildings and structures, retrofitting with modern seismic codes—such as reinforced wall-slab connections, structural sizing, and shock absorbers—can reduce the risk of collapse and severe damage while reinforcing the structure of buildings.
Lessons from other countries offer valuable insights. For example, base isolation—used in nearly 10,000 buildings in Japan—enabled hospitals in Turkey to endure minimal damage during the 2023 earthquakes. Despite the earthquakes causing over US$34 billion in damages, the hospitals remained operational, demonstrating the effectiveness of this technique.
For new buildings, the TallWood project demonstrates that mass timber offers a sustainable, carbon-storing, earthquake-resistant alternative to steel and concrete. The design, used in 10-story buildings, includes a “rocking wall” that allows panels to move and return to their original position after seismic shaking. Tibet could adopt similar strategies, adapting innovative seismic designs to local ecological, geological, and cultural contexts.
Thirdly, technological advances in hazard forecasting—powered by supercomputers, satellites, and sensors—are improving the precision of seismic and weather predictions. Tibet should integrate these technologies to shift from reactive to proactive disaster resilience. AI models like Huawei’s Pangu-Weather, which forecasts typhoons and floods, could help produce multi-hazard risk assessments, predict aftershocks, map landslide risks via satellite Internet of Technology networks, and reduce emergency response times.
The effectiveness of this technology was evident during Typhoon Gaemi in Fujian, where AI-powered disaster warnings and drones helped evacuate 312,700 residents without casualties. Scaling such tools, including AI-driven seismic risk models, across earthquake-prone regions like Tibet as part of a broader monitoring network could help save lives and billions in yuan annually.
Further supporting these efforts, Tibetan authorities could partner with tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei to fast-track predictive systems, drone damage assessments, and blockchain-based aid distribution.
Complementing these technologies, smart materials like self-healing concrete—tested in Singapore’s infrastructure projects— could strengthen rebuilt infrastructure. By embedding such innovations, China can convert vulnerable regions like Tibet into models of tech-augmented resilience.
Challenges still lie ahead. A major issue is funding such initiatives due to potentially high costs. Local governments burdened by substantial debt may struggle to prioritize such expensive projects, particularly given the State Council’s warning in January that local governments must prioritize fiscal responsibility over excessive spending on projects. Concerns are compounded by the ongoing efforts of local governments to address revenue shortfalls by liquidating state-owned assets in a process described as “smashing iron pots and selling the steel.”
Amid a national economic slowdown, local governments facing soaring debt may understandably prioritize immediate needs over long-term climate resilience programs. To tackle financing challenges, the TAR government may seek loans from the central government, private sector investment, or even enter public-private partnerships with multilateral institutions. There is interest from the World Bank, for instance, which has pledged US$1 billion for Himalayan climate resilience.
The pursuit of technological research and development should also be encouraged. As technological leaps in hazard forecasting—powered by supercomputers, satellites, and indigenously developed sensors—are refining the precision of hydrometeorological and seismic predictions, the private sector, research institutions, and universities could work together to run related pilot programs, including in Tibet.
The Tibet earthquake is a wake-up call: disasters will continue, but devastation can be mitigated. For Tibet—and all of China—the future lies in rebuilding not just homes, but resilience. With the central government’s and local government’s initial steps, scaling up efforts will be crucial to building a climate-resilient future.
