It’s hard to comprehend the pace of development when we live through it day to day—until we see photos like those of Shenzhen below, taken nearly four decades apart. Shenzhen’s designation in the 1980s as China’s first special economic zone kickstarted its breakneck industrialization from small fishing village to global economic powerhouse. It is a testament to humanity’s ability to reshape our environment in the name of economic growth. But at what cost?
Today, Shenzhen is but one city within the much larger Greater Bay Area (GBA)—a megalopolis of 11 cities housing around 85 million people. Already contributing over 10% of China’s national GDP in 2025, the GBA generated around RMB 15 trillion (USD $2.1 trillion) in 2025, which would rank it as the world’s 12th largest economy.
China’s “one country, two systems” framework governs how mainland China and special administrative regions like Hong Kong and Macau maintain separate political, legislative and financial systems. Yet environmental challenges pay no respect to borders or contested geopolitics. How the GBA collectively reconciles its pace of urbanization with the need to safeguard vulnerable ecological systems from climate change and biodiversity loss remains unanswered.
Just last year, Super Typhoon Ragasa—one of the worst tropical cyclones ever to hit the region—made landfall across the GBA, causing widespread infrastructure damage and critical service shutdowns. Economists estimate economic losses in Hong Kong alone at HKD $2-3 billion (USD $257-386 million).
We know that warming sea surface temperatures from anthropogenic climate change are expected to intensify the strength of tropical cyclones, making events like Ragasa more frequent and severe. One response to this issue is China’s concept of “ecological Civilization (生态文明)”—a development approach rooted in ancient philosophy and enshrined in the constitution since 2018—that calls for a more harmonious relationship between people and nature rather than subordinating nature to economic growth.
The Nature Conservancy, a global environmental nonprofit, has taken on the challenge of translating that philosophy into action, convening leaders and experts across different parts of the world and disciplines at the second iteration of its Nature-based Solutions Action Week, held in Hong Kong, to explore how nature-based solutions can be implemented at the scale the GBA demands.
The Resilient Greater Bay Area Accelerator is a multi-year partnership between the Nature Conservancy and the Columbia Climate School. Co-convened by these partners, as well as the Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects, a cross-sector workshop during the Nature-based Solutions Action Week brought together experts in engineering, planning and design, finance, policy and climate science to develop a shared set of recommendations for advancing nature-based solutions across the Shenzhen River Basin.
The Columbia team arrived in Hong Kong in early June and joined field tours across the region. One day, on a bus crossing the Shenzhen Deep Bay from Hong Kong into Shenzhen, my eyes were glued to the vast expanse of oyster rafts that stopped abruptly in the middle of the bay. The bay is flanked by two distinct landscapes: on the Shenzhen side, a dense skyline of towering skyscrapers; on the Hong Kong side, a lush, green, rural landscape labelled “Northern Metropolis,” now earmarked for development focused on housing and technology.
While these rafts represent ancient practices dating back thousands of years, the absence of oyster aquaculture on the Shenzhen side of the estuary traces directly to more contemporary issues, where rapid industrialization laid claims to natural shorelines and degraded water quality in the Deep Bay. Consequently, the Shenzhen government banned aquaculture in the early 2000s. This journey rendered visible for us an otherwise invisible political boundary. At the same time, the oyster reefs provide tangible coastal ecosystem benefits like serving as storm barriers and improving water quality. They are essential to the fabric of a resilient GBA.
An adaptation and resilience accelerator workshop
The environmental challenges facing the GBA are so massively distributed across space and time that no single actor can reasonably address them alone. Convening over 60 participants across finance, government, academia, design, conservation and infrastructure to prototype place-based nature-based solutions and the system-wide enablers needed to scale them was energizing.
Three takeaways emerged from the intensive workshop, all focused on achieving systems-scale impact:
1. Collaborate across boundaries
“The shared economic, climate, and environmental challenges facing the GBA cannot be solved within borders,” said Henk Ovink, executive director of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water and professor at the Delft University of Technology, during the workshop. “This systemic, holistic and collaborative approach is how to get the world back on track.”
Scaling nature-based solutions is not just a technical challenge. Instead, a recurring theme across the week’s discussion was about connectivity—not just in the sense of connecting fragmented ecological systems but also across public institutions and private finance.
As Christine Loh, chief development strategist at the Institute for the Environment at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, noted, the governance challenge is transforming “participation to priorities; ideas to mandates; pilots to systems.” The task ahead is getting diverse institutional stakeholders to understand each other’s interests and constraints and to co-produce systems-level solutions.
Governments across the GBA have already begun collaborating to establish transboundary ecological corridors and conservation platforms.
2. Center local solutions
The GBA’s climate and biodiversity challenges fall disproportionately on coastal and estuarine communities, where livelihoods and cultural identities are closely entwined with the landscape.
Scaling nature-based solutions is a long-term social and economic challenge as much as an ecological one. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s updated global standard for nature-based solutions calls explicitly for “inclusive governance and equity,” recognizing the need for local communities to have genuine agency in shaping place-based solutions.
In the GBA, the Nature Conservancy’s local team mobilizes more than 1,500 volunteers per year in support of establishing and stewarding a coastal management and protection zone. As Lulu Zhou, director of strategic partnerships for climate resilience in the Asia Pacific at the Nature Conservancy Hong Kong, noted: “Stakeholder engagement is key not just for initial project support, but also long-term buy-in and stewardship.”
3. Blend capital to scale nature
Nature is fundamentally a public good. While some nature-based solutions generate revenue or reduce costs, many deliver benefits that are shared across society and realized over decades, making them difficult to finance through private markets alone. For those, concessionary capital must lay the foundations.
The workshop aimed to generate a portfolio of investments grounded in reality that balance revenue and non-revenue generating value at landscape-scale. For example, value capture through transportation and housing tied to nature-based solutions standards could generate revenue to offset conservation costs. As Mieke Siebers, executive director at the Foundation for Sustainable Development observed, “building the capital stack to finance [nature-based solutions] is like building a stable Jenga tower—each block represents a different type of financier and each plays a distinct structural role.”
The Jenga tower is a creative metaphor for thinking about the full architecture of risk-sharing to mobilize capital more creatively across public, philanthropic and private sources; and explore novel instruments such as nature bonds, insurance and outcome-based financing.
In the action week’s opening remarks, Anthony Gao, executive director of the Nature Conservancy Hong Kong, invoked the Chinese proverb “星星之火, 可以燎原” (“a single spark can start a prairie fire”). It’s a timely reminder that paradigm-shifting ideas can illuminate as much as they destroy. Our anthropocentric development script has long burned a rift between people and nature.
The GBA, for all its contradictions, offers us an opportunity to imagine otherwise. Should it succeed, the GBA will have proven to the world what a whole-of-society approach can look like when embedding resilience at a systems scale.
Acknowledgments:
The Nature Conservancy:
Lulu Zhou, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Climate Resilience, TNC Asia Pacific
Allison Lewin, Director of Climate Partnerships, TNC Asia Pacific
Marine Thomas, Associate Director of Conservation, TNC Hong Kong
Fan Zhang, GBA Resilience Strategy Director, TNC Beijing
Scott Lim, Nature-based Solutions Project Manager, TNC Hong Kong
Xunyu Zhang, Shenzhen Program Manager, TNC Shenzhen
Columbia:
Johanna Lovecchio, Senior Director of Engagement and Impact, Columbia Climate School
Thad Pawlowski, Managing Director, Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes
Lisa Dale, Senior Lecturer in Climate and Director of M.A. in Climate & Society, Columbia Climate School
Xinyu Zhang, Project Manager and Urban Designer, Center for Resilient Cities & Landscapes
Mark Yeo, M.A. Climate & Society Candidate, Columbia Climate School
Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects:
Paul Chan, President, Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects Asia-Pacific Region
Benni Yu-ling Pong, Vice President, Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects
Claudia Yu, Associate Director and East Asia Urban Design & Landscape Architecture Practice Leader, ARUP
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
