Satellites, drones and AI: China's disaster-response tech serves 133 countries as the planet heats up

The world has just lived through one of its three hottest years on record, as confirmed in the World Meteorological Organization's 2025 climate report. Asia is warming twice as fast as the global average, according to the UN. Southeast Asia sweltered under a heatwave that pushed the heat index past 51 degrees Celsius in the Philippines, while Pakistan saw another devastating monsoon flood season.

These are not isolated events. As extreme weather becomes the new normal, the question is no longer whether disasters will strike, but how well the world is prepared.

The technological answer, increasingly, comes from China. Its Fengyun meteorological satellite network – nine satellites in orbit backed by 842 weather radars and more than 90,000 ground stations – now provides real-time data to 133 countries and regions. Three new satellites are due for launch in 2025-2026 to cover the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, two of the most cyclone-prone zones on Earth.

Chen Zhenlin, head of the China Meteorological Administration, told China Daily that the microwave satellites can penetrate cloud cover to analyze typhoon structures and provide Pacific island nations with 72-hour advance cyclone warnings. "This will give nations across Asia and the Pacific advance warnings ranging from hours to days," Chen said.

China's "Action Plan on Early Warning for Climate Change Adaptation (2025-2027)," unveiled at climate change COP29, was praised by Selwin Hart, the UN secretary-general's climate adviser, as the first national plan directly supporting the UN's Early Warnings for All initiative. The goal: every person on the planet protected by early warning systems by 2027. A cloud-based system has already been deployed in Pakistan and the Solomon Islands, and China has pledged to train 2,000 specialists over two years.

When disasters do strike and ground infrastructure fails, drones take over. The Wing Long-2H, an emergency-response drone developed by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, can function as an airborne cell tower, restoring mobile coverage over 50 square kilometers and building a 15,000-square-kilometer audio-video communications network. In July 2025, it completed China's first typhoon early-warning reconnaissance mission, shadowing Typhoon Wepha along the coast and sending 6,000 SMS messages to residents in affected areas.

Beneath the surface, China has built the world's largest earthquake early-warning network – about 18,000 observation stations – and an AI system called AIRES that detects five times more seismic events than manual processing.

The DiTing model, the world's first earthquake-wave large model with billion-level parameters, was released for open use in January 2025 and has already been applied to real earthquake data from southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region.