China Dialogue reports on a Beijing taxi driver who is working with the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau to end China’s water woes:
The bureau had begun a campaign on March 26 encouraging the public to: “Put forward suggestions for conservation in the capital and prepare for the green Olympics.” A month later, Liu stopped off at the bureau and handed in his essay, “Drought in northern China: its causes and solutions”. The essay was later identified as one of the best proposals the bureau had received.
Liu believes that the direct cause of the drought is north China’s ever-decreasing rainfall. He looked at rainfall data and found 700-800 millimetres fell every year in some parts of the north China plain. But between 1997 and 2005, the average annual rainfall in Beijing was only 466 millimetres. He wanted to know why it was so much lower. [Full text]