The 2021 Henan flood increased citizen demand for government-led climate change adaptation in China

Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, raising urgent questions about how citizens engage with such crises, especially in authoritarian and developing countries. We analyze citizen engagement on China’s Local Leaders’ Message Board, a government-run petition platform, to examine how residents communicate demands for public safety and infrastructure. Using a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative analysis and topic modeling of petition data, we demonstrate that the 2021 Henan flood, one of the deadliest in China’s recent history, led to a sharp increase in petitions concerning drainage, neighborhood safety, and flood prevention. These demands, although not framed in climate-specific language, reflect calls for state-led adaptation that is concrete and localized. We also find that concern about the disaster and preparedness extended beyond Henan, prompting appeals in unaffected provinces. These findings suggest that climate risk can catalyze political engagement in non-democratic settings, highlighting the value of citizen input in adaptation planning. In China, the 2021 Henan flood event led to an increase in citizen demands for drainage, neighborhood safety, and flood prevention, calling for concrete and localized state-led adaptation, according to an analysis combining a statistical approach and a neural topic modeling approach.