Decoding Chinese Ancient Culture-related Nature-based Solutions for Flood-Resilience Using Modern Informatics

Climate change has intensified extreme rainfall events, while rapid urban expansion has reduced rainwater infiltration. Together, these processes have disrupted urban hydrological systems and increased the frequency and severity of urban flooding, posing growing threats to lives and property. Conventional flood mitigation strategies largely depend on extensive grey infrastructure, such as pipes and tunnels, designed to rapidly evacuate stormwater. However, many of these systems were developed in the last century and are increasingly economically and ecologically unsustainable under intensifying rainfall extremes. In response, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have gained prominence as sustainable approaches that work with natural processes to enhance flood resilience. Although NbS are often framed as a modern response to climate change, similar principles have long existed in traditional ecological and planning practices. However, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is frequently regarded as fragmented or highly context-specific, which limits its systematic integration into contemporary flood resilience frameworks. As a result, it remains unclear whether such historically grounded practices can be translated into generalisable, scientifically testable principles applicable to modern NbS design and flood risk assessment.

Here, we present a systematic interpretation of flood management strategies in ancient Chinese civilisation through the lens of Feng Shui. Feng Shui is an indigenous planning philosophy centred on the concept of harmony between humans and nature and has been widely applied in traditional village site selection and layout. This study focuses specifically on the local water management principles embedded within Feng Shui. We synthesise ancient texts and classical literature to reconstruct traditional water-planning concepts and relate them to contemporary hydrological and geomorphological theory. Using spatial statistical and mathematical fitting analyses across more than 300 historical villages, we demonstrate the consistency and non-site-specificity of these principles. Furthermore, hydrodynamic simulations of a representative village show that Feng Shui–inspired water systems can effectively reduce flood depths and peak flows under present-day extreme rainfall scenarios, through mechanisms such as distributed storage, controlled diversion, and flow-path reorganisation.

Together, these results indicate that traditional village planning embodied core principles analogous to those underpinning modern NbS. Our findings provide quantitative evidence for the scientific basis, adaptability, and flood mitigation effectiveness of traditional ecological knowledge. More broadly, this study demonstrates a methodological pathway for translating TEK into scientifically grounded frameworks by integrating historical analysis, spatial statistics, and numerical modelling, highlighting its potential relevance for contemporary flood resilience assessment and NbS design.