Interconnection increases urban resilience: Railway networks can increase cities’ resilience to extreme weather events

How can we make our cities more resilient as climate change exacerbates extreme weather events? While many researchers are grappling with this pressing topic, the area of disaster resilience tends to be tackled by investigating individual cities. Cities are of course not independent islands, but are part of a network of relationships and movements of people, knowledge, goods, and ideas. Could investigating cities as part of a network offer hints into increasing their resilience when faced with natural challenges?

ARC Laureate and Distinguished Professor Xuemei Bai has been researching the importance of intercity connections for increasing the urban resilience in the face of extreme weather events and disasters exacerbated by climate change. She has argued various times (such as in Science and Nature) that networked functional resilience is a key concept for finding practical solutions. The idea in its simplest form suggests that proactively creating partnerships between cities, and cities and their hinterland, can prepare us to “act together when shocks hit one or more cities” in the era of the polycrises. Networked resilience forms one cornerstone of Professor Bai’s ARC Laureate project Cities as Transformative Agents for a climate-safe future.

A paper published on July 17th by Professor Xuemei Bai and Dr. Haiyan Liu in the journal Nature Climate Change empirically demonstrates the concept of networked functional resilience across cities. Titled "Intercity connectivity enhances urban mobility resilience to extreme rainfall”, the paper empirically investigate human mobility resilience. This is done by looking at mobility data from 1.1 billion devices across 366 Chinese cities as a proxy for human mobility between cities, and investigating how these change around extreme rainfall events between 2013-2023.

The study finds that intercity connectivity can help with faster post-disaster support and recovery, and lowers productivity losses compared to cities that are less-well connected. Related findings are:

• The inverse was also found to be true, where constraining intercity connectivity shows greater productivity losses.

• Being connected to multiple cities is beneficial, possibly due to relieving recovery bottlenecks by having diversified interaction channels.

• Being connected to wealthy cities is beneficial especially for short term recovery.

• The gains of connections of wealthy cities are greater for smaller and poorer cities.

• Rail networks between cities also predict reduced productivity losses, suggesting that railways are a concrete way of increasing intercity connectivity.

The paper finds empirical support for the concept of networked resilience, which in turn suggests the value of incorporating a network-oriented perspective in addition to city-centred climate adaptation strategies. While it is unclear how generalisable the findings from China are to other parts of the world, this study encourages further research into networked functional resilience in other regions to find global solutions.

Liu, H., Bai, X. Intercity connectivity enhances urban mobility resilience to extreme rainfall. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02713-x