At least 25 people in the central Chinese province of Henan died on Tuesday, including a dozen trapped in a city subway as waters tore through the regional capital of Zhengzhou after days of torrential rain.

Coming after floods killed at least 160 people in Germany and another 31 in Belgium last week, the disaster has reinforced the message that significant changes will have to be made to prepare for similar events in future.

"Governments should first realize that the infrastructure they have built in the past or even recent ones are vulnerable to these extreme weather events," said Eduardo Araral, associate professor and co-director, Institute of Water Policy, at Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

In Europe, climate change is likely to increase the number of large, slow-moving storms that can linger longer in one area and deliver deluges of the kind seen in Germany and Belgium, according to a study published June 30 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

As the atmosphere warms with climate change, it also holds more moisture, which means that when rainclouds break, more rain is released. By the end of the century, such storms could be 14 times more frequent, the researchers found in the study using computer simulations.

While the inundation that devastated wide swathes of western and southern Germany occurred thousands of kilometers from the events in Henan, both cases highlighted the vulnerability of heavily populated areas to catastrophic flooding and other natural disasters.

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