China’s climate-linked disasters throughout 2024 and 2025— from floods to record heat — underscored the systemic risks of ecological breakdown, making resilience through ‘nature infrastructure’ an urgent priority. Premier Li Qiang’s 2025 Government Work Report reflects this urgency, placing green transition and systemic resilience at the heart of China’s modernisation and long-term development.

The Premier’s emphasis on resilience reflects a strategic deepening of China’s long-term strategy. Just as solar and batteries became pillars of high-quality growth once recognised as critical infrastructure, the same logic can be applied to forests, wetlands and soils. These are living assets that safeguard food and energy security, reduce disaster risks and strengthen ‘common prosperity’. In today’s climate-vulnerable era, recognising nature as core infrastructure is both an ecological imperative and a resilient economic strategy.

China has institutionalised this approach through the Ecological Conservation Redline (ECR) system, Main Functional Zoning, and Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) accounting, all reinforced by the National Climate Adaptation Strategy 2035 and the amended Environmental Protection Law. These frameworks integrate ecosystems into development planning while enforcing ecological accountability. The ECR system in particular treats forests and wetlands as strategic assets—a model now extending globally through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s (AIIB) nature-positive finance frameworks.