🌱 Environment

Citywide Smart Drainage & Waterlogging Early-Warning Platform

Guangzhou Water Authority kicked off its "smart drainage" (智慧排水) platform on 31 July 2020 with a ¥358 million (~$50M) build wiring the city's roughly 35,000km of pipes, 64 wastewater plants and nearly 40,000 drainage units into one IoT network — electronic water gauges at flood-prone points, level sensors on trunk sewers, and online monitors at treatment-plant inlets/outlets. By 2024 the network had grown to 6,860 monitoring stations feeding a forecast system that combines radar rainfall, traffic and drainage data to flag waterlogging risk before it happens; China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development named it a national exemplary case. The platform forecasts and helps dispatch response crews to flood-prone points — it does not itself trigger pumps or barriers, so the warning still depends on a human crew acting on it.

Live 📅 since 2020

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-02

🌱 Environment Flood resilience Sensors & IoT Water

📊 Impact

6,860 IoT monitoring stations citywide by 2024, covering 35,000km of drainage pipes, 64 treatment plants and 39,734 drainage units; named a Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development national exemplary smart-water case (Guangzhou Water Authority / MOHURD, 2020–2025).

🎓 Lesson

A city-scale sensor network is real infrastructure even when it only reaches the 'warns, doesn't act' rung of the sensor-to-action ladder.

Evidence🏛️ Official

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Cost≈¥358M (~$50M) total build investment

📖 Terms in this entry: Non-revenue water (NRW) · Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin

Sources

↗ Oriental Guangdong / oeeee.com (press)31 July 2020 project kickoff: ¥358M investment, 35,000km pipe network, 64 plants, 39,734 drainage units, 3–5-year build plan.

↗ Yangcheng Evening News (press)Confirms the 'Guangzhou Smart Drainage' platform has become a national benchmark and a MOHURD-recognized exemplary smart-water case.

↗ WaterTech China (trade press, English)English-language corroboration: unified 'one-map' system, AI + 140,000 video feeds identifying waterlogging points, national-benchmark status.

↗ Guangzhou Water Authority (official, via search)2024 work summary citing 6,860 IoT water-monitoring stations and the 'eyes-hands-brain-body' coordinated network; page returned HTTP 503 on direct fetch, content verified via search-result extraction.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇩🇪 Hamburg Heavy Rain Map & Severity Index · Hamburg Both are citywide rain-sensor networks that only warn, sitting on rung 2 rather than triggering pumps or barriers. 🇨🇴 SIATA Early Warning Network · Medellín Same warn-but-don't-act rung: both fuse rainfall and level sensors into a forecast a human crew must act on. 🇰🇷 Busan Urban Flood Warning System (Busan Safety ON) · Busan Both flood networks followed a fatal underpass/waterlogging event; neither system itself closes a barrier.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 🌊 Flood resilience guide 🏙️ Guangzhou city profile 🌱 Environment projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Citywide Smart Drainage & Waterlogging Early-Warning Platform” — Guangzhou, China. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/guangzhou-smart-drainage/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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