China Digital Times

China news tagged with: desertification (19)

• Photos: China’s Creeping Sands

  

  ChinaDialogue has posted a slideshow of stunning images documenting the desertification of China by photographer Sean Gallagher:

  Desertification is the gradual transformation of arable and habitable land into desert, normally caused by climate change or the destructive use of land. Each year, desertification and drought account for US$42 billion loss in food productivity worldwide.

  It is estimated that nearly 20% of China’s land area, some 1.74 million square kilometres, is now classified as desert. Affecting the lives of an estimated 400 million people, it is one of the most important environmental issues in China today.

  Gallagher’s notes from the field can be read here.

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  • June 27, 2009 1:13 PM

• Guardian: China’s Water Crisis

  

  As part of their China at the Crossroads series, the Guardian looks at China’s water crisis. One article visits eco-refugees in Gansu:

  Huang is one of millions of Chinese eco-refugees who have been resettled because their home environments degraded to the point where they were no longer fit for human habitation. The government says more than 150 million people will have to be moved. Water shortages exacerbated by over-irrigation and climate change are the main cause.

  The problem is most severe in the north-west, where desert sands are swallowing up farmland, homes and towns. Huang lives in Mingqin, a shrinking oasis area that government advisers privately describe as an “ecological disaster area”.

  The Yellow river is diverted more than 62 miles (100km) to replenish dried-up reservoirs and aquifers in Minqin, where the population has swollen from 860,000 to 2.3 million over the last 60 years, even as water supplies have declined.

  It is not enough. The Tengger desert is encroaching from the south-east and the Badain Jaran desert from the north-west. Since 1950 the oasis has shrunk by 111 square miles (288 sq km), while the number of annual superdust storms has increased more than fourfold. In Liangzhou district, 240 of the 291 springs have dried up.

  Watch the video report.

  Another report (and video) looks at critics of the south-north water diversion project:

  The Guardian was the first foreign news organisation to enter the pits and tunnels at Jiaozuo in Henan province, which are at the centre of China’s latest, greatest engineering project, the South-North Water Diversion Scheme. In the spirit of President Hu Jintao’s drive for “scientific development”, the aim is to engineer a solution to the most pressing environmental problem – the alarming depletion of water resources in the arid, heavily populated north.

  More than twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam and three times longer than the railway to Tibet, the 50-year, $62bn (£40.67bn) project aims to channel a greater volume than the Thames along three channels – each more than 600 miles long – from the moist Yangtze basin up to the dry lands above the Yellow river.

  [...] The project has sparked so many ecological, financial and political concerns that government advisers are calling for the plan to be delayed and, possibly, curtailed, raising the possibility that this could prove a mega-project too far even for China. First proposed in 1962, the scheme was approved by Mao Zedong, who said it was fine for the south to “lend a little water”, but until recently the government has not had the money or technical ability to go ahead.

  Read more from the Guardian’s China at the Crossroads series.

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  • May 20, 2009 10:46 AM

• China 2008: Environmental Crisis

  

  This next article in the CDT series on important issues facing China in 2008 focuses on the Environment. See also previous posts on Nationalism, the Developing World, and the Global Financial Crisis.

  China’s environmental issues have increased in scale in 2008 as the country strives to maintain its economic growth and development. In particular, air pollution has worsened rapidly between 2007-2008 after a sharp rise in 2002. China’s total carbon emissions and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are estimated to have surpassed the United States, which has been the number one carbon emitter in the world. China’s increase in emissions is due to the burning of coal to generate the needed power for development. Air pollution is costing China alone $82 billion in economic losses this year. In addition to air pollution, China suffers from desertification, water pollution, soil erosion, indoor air pollution, and e-waste.

  In particular, air pollution, water pollution, and e-waste have sickened many and even claimed the lives of Chinese citizens. Besides the urban centers in China, according to the Chinese Environmental Aspect Bulletin, the rural areas are facing a major environmental crisis as well.

  How has the Chinese government responded to the gigantic environmental crisis that the country is facing? It has begun to invest in other energy sources in addition to coal. These energy sources include hydropower which requires building dams (such as the South Tibet dam), nuclear power, wind power, solar power, and even a more innovative solution such as burning straw. The government has also initiated large scale projects, such as forest rehabilitation, a ban on the use of plastic bags, reducing car traffic in Beijing and Shanghai, the construction of an eco-city in Dongtan, and rural environmental protection. Another recent innovative solution is the “smart grid” management of the electricity and information technology infrastructure.

  The efficacy of China’s environmental effort is largely in question. While some US research institutions, such as MIT and Yale, have produced optimistic reports about China’s environmental effort, some remain skeptical about Beijing’s reporting on pollution numbers. The building of dams is met by local people’s resistance due to its damage to the ecosystem. Forest reclamation might be too late for the relentlessly encroaching desert. The Dongtan eco-city project is now stalled. Smog returned to Beijing soon after the Olympics was over, and Isabel Hilton wrote in China Dialogue that China needs to clean up after the Olympics. Greenpeace China also produced a report on Beijing’s environment before and after the Olympics. Enforcement of the ban on the use plastic bags is a struggle. Worse yet, when faced with the global economic melt-down, China is retreating its environmental effort in order to keep up its economic growth for the reason of stabilizing the society.

  What is the attitude of Chinese citizens toward the country’s environmental crisis? The Ministry of Environmental Protection surveyed citizens’ satisfaction about the country’s environmental management. More Chinese value their environment over the economy according another report. Following the Xiamen PX protest last year, another protest against the building of a chemical plant was held.

  While the environmental law needs to be tightened and codified, environmental litigation is being carried out by environmental litigators, such as Zhang Jingjing. However, grassroots environmental protection remains a relatively small force in comparison to industries’ cooperation with the government. For example, Beijing offers companies cash incentives to curb the capital’s pollution. Eco-enterprises are seizing opportunities for green investments. Big Chinese companies are joining global climate groups in reducing energy consumption.

  Due to the global impact of China’s environmental crisis, Japan and the U.S. are pressing China as well as other developing countries, such as India, to have carbon emission caps. While some voices within China also propose that China needs to assume a primary role in tackling the country’s environmental problems, the official government response pointed to rich countries to do the cleanup, during recent global climate talks.

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  • December 5, 2008 8:58 PM

• Desertification Causes Yearly Loss of 54 Billion Yuan in China

  

  According to People’s Daily Online, desertification is costing China 54 billion yuan every year.

  Tang Yuan, general director of the Research Department for Industry, Transportation and Trade, of the State Council Development Research Center, disclosed on November 25 that the direct economic loss from desertification reaches 54 billion yuan every year. This has already affected the lives and productivity of nearly 400 million people.

  The Cleaner Green China blog argues that these numbers are under-reporting.

  Realistically, given the various unmeasurable costs this number is vastly under reported [...] For anyone who follows climate change, and the impact of human beings, it does not require a lot more information to understand the size of the problem that is being faced in China’s Northern territory.

  To learn more about the desertification in China, follow CDT’s desertification tag for more articles.

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  • November 29, 2008 10:54 AM

• The Chinese Dust Bowl

  

  The Canadian magazine The Walrus has a lengthy article looking at the desertification of China:

  To date, Chinese farmers and herders have transformed about 400,000 square kilometres of cropland and verdant prairie into new deserts. The shepherds have overgrazed the steppes, allowing their sheep and goats to chew the grass all the way down to its roots. The farmers, for their part, have over-exploited the arable land by opening fragile grasslands to cultivation and over-pumping rivers and aquifers in the oases bordering the ancient deserts. The area of desert thus created is equivalent to more than half the farmland in Canada.

  The soil, once it is barren, is swept up by the wind into dust storms, battering the capital, Beijing, and then moving on to Korea and Japan. The most massive of the yellow clouds of dust make their way across the Pacific and reach North America. The loss of precious topsoil for Chinese agriculture ends up polluting both China’s cities and countries halfway around the world.

  The North American “dust bowl” of the 1930s forced three million farmers to abandon their land in the Midwest and the Canadian prairies. But the Chinese exodus could reach well into the tens of millions. Governmental relocation programs for ecological refugees are already in full swing.

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  • June 2, 2008 10:40 PM

• Reign of Sand: Inner Mongolia

  

  A compelling multimedia project from Circle of Blue reports on the freshwater crisis in Inner Mongolia, where desertification threatens not only its startlingly beautiful steppes, but its nomadic residents’ way of life. According to the Pacific Institute:

  “It’s much more than a landscape surrendering to the sand,” says J. Carl Ganter, director of Circle of Blue, the journalism-based news, science and collaborative project covering water issues worldwide. “We’re looking at a crucial international economic and environmental story that has implications for us all.”

  As China prepares for the Summer Olympic Games in August, international focus on its air pollution is increasing. The main target is to reduce urban smog from car and coal emissions, but China’s sand storms are an equal threat to air quality and human health. They are often driven by 80 mile-per-hour winds that last for days. These storms, along with the water shortages and the land degradation causing them, underscore the extreme stress that China’s economic development is putting on its environment and its 1.3 billion people.

  “Reign of Sand” comes as China’s spring dust storms approach. Scientists say the severity and frequency of the dust storms reflect worsening conditions: Dryer climate, stronger winds, water shortages, over-grazing, population growth, and a clash between nomadic herders and the government over range and farmland management.

  The preview video below offers a hint of the full online package, which documents the situation through an interactive map, video and photo galleries, as well as feature articles.

  See more China Digital Times coverage of China’s environmental crisis.

  Photo: Palani Mohan, Getty Images, for Circle of Blue
  Video: Eric Daigh, for Circle Blue

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  • February 12, 2008 9:14 PM

• China’s “Green Deserts” - Gaoming Jiang

  

  From China Dialogue:

  China’s tree-planting movement continues down a worrying path. The planting of artificial, single-species forests has not abated in China; in fact, it has worsened. The country’s original distribution of trees: fir trees in the south, poplars in the north, has made way for poplars everywhere – north, south, east and west. There are even attempts to start poplar plantations on the southern tropical island of Hainan.

  High-density, single-species forests are a source of almost never-ending problems. Some even call them “green deserts” since they are very poor at retaining soil or water, unproductive and monocultural. China has the largest area of artificial forests in the world, but ranks last in terms of these forests’ productivity. These single-species require the constant use of fertilisers and other chemicals. They are weak ecosystems that are vulnerable to disease and pests, which can devastate large areas. They are also unattractive; artificial forests in scenic areas and along roads and railways are nothing to look at. [Full text]

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  • January 8, 2008 9:40 PM

• Growing Desert Closing in on Guansu Oasis Town - Lanzhou Morning Post

  

  Worsening ecological degradation in China’s wild west, rom Lanzhou Morning Post (兰州晨报), translated by CDT:

  Xihu National Nature Preserve (西湖国家级自然保护区) sits in between Dunhuang (敦煌), Gansu’s oasis town, and China’s sixth largest desert, the Kum-tagh (库姆塔格). The 660,000-hectare region is the only green belt that shields lands to the east from marching sands coming out of the west. Wetlands in the preserve are shrinking, the result of dropping water tables and decreasing water supply from glaciers on Qilian and Altun (阿尔金) mountains. The region’s Shule (疏勒河) and Dang (党河) Rivers have gone nearly dry in laces, reducing above-ground water supplies to both Dunhuang and Xihu. The expansion of agriculture around Dunhuang and a boom in logging of Euphrates poplar forests (胡杨林) for construction have made the water shortage worse.

  Duan Hailin (段海林), a Dunhuang farmer in his 70s and a frequent traveler to the Xihu preserve, recalled the region’s several rivers in the 1950s. In those years, he said, the area was filled with lush reeds and trees and sometimes herds of wolves, making a lone visit very scary. Now, bushes are gone and the land is dry. The variety and quantity of wildlife have also fallen dramatically.

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  • December 31, 2007 12:38 PM

• Shifting Desert Puts Silk Road Art At Risk - Michael Sheridan

  

  From The Sunday Times:

  The shifting sands of China’s deserts - already blamed for dust clouds adding to global pollution - now threaten to bury the world’s outstanding collection of ancient Buddhist art in caves along the fabled Silk Road.

  The frescoes and statues in the renowned Dunhuang caves are being damaged by grit blown from the Kumtag desert and could be buried by the dunes, according to Wang Jiru, director of the provincial desert control institute.

  “The desert is growing because the River Shule, which runs through the oasis, has so many dams on it that its waters are shrinking,” Wang told Xin-hua, the Chinese news agency. [Full Text]

  Read also Creeping desert threatens Mogao grottoes by Wang Shanshan.

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  • November 11, 2007 8:41 AM

• Revitalizing China’s Dust Bowl - Mara Hvistendah

  

  From The World Changing blog:

  Western China is turning into a massive dust bowl. Desertification now affects fully one-third of the world’s population — and what’s happening in Western China represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert anywhere in the world, consuming over one million acres of land each year. The dust isn’t confined to the west: every spring, massive sandstorms roar through Beijing, blanketing the city with tons of dust.

  The October issue of the Canadian magazine The Walrus has an excellent feature by Patrick Alleyn on efforts to combat desertification in China (subscription-only, but 10-day trials are available). Benoit Aquin’s startling photos, which accompany the article, have been circulating on Chinese bulletin boards. [Full Text]

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  • October 8, 2007 9:30 PM

• Slideshow: Desertification and Sandstorms in China - Wenxuecity

  

  Desertification in China is a pressing environmental challenge. Here is some alarming data, from AFP:
  
  

  “China has raised the environmental alarm bell after a survey found over a quarter of its land has become desert, with much of the damage caused by human activity. Desertification has affected 28 per cent of China’s land mass, with 18 per cent of the country turning to waste through the effects of overgrazing, deforestation and other ravages, the China Daily said, citing a State Forestry Administration survey. The report followed another survey last week which showed soil erosion affected 37 per cent of China’s land”.
  
  

  And here are some images of villages, houses, towns and cities in sandstorms, caused by the increasingly severe desertification, from the popular overseas Chinese BBS: wenxueciti.com:
  
  

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  • October 5, 2007 9:47 PM

• China Sounds Retreat Against Encroaching Deserts - Simon Montlake

  

  From The Christian Science Monitor:

  Behind the walled farmhouses, where fields of cotton and fennel bask in bright sunshine, the desert begins. Pale ochre sand dunes loom over rows of carefully tended crops that represent a lifetime of labor for the 21 families who live here.

  As the desert closes in, this community has been told to leave, so that their fields can be replanted with native grass. Local authorities say this will revive the parched land and halt the sand dunes, and have promised new land and housing to villagers. The forced move is an admission that China’s grandiose plans to turn its arid land into farms have run dry. In recent years, China has met some success in slowing the sands by imposing curbs on grazing in Inner Mongolia and other measures. [Full Text]

  [Image:Desert in the northwestern part of China, by Simon Montlake]

  Click here to See the audio slideshow by Simon Montlake.

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  • August 16, 2007 12:04 PM

• Expanding Deserts in China Forcing Farmers From Fields, Sending Sandstorms Across Pacific - AP

  

  During the Great Leap Forward, irrigation efforts attempted to make China’s dry western regions into arable land. But farmers are losing the battle against the deserts, which now cover one-third of the country. From AP:

  In a problem that is pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a final effort to halt the advance of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts. [Full text]

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  • June 18, 2007 2:50 PM

• China’s Growing Desert - Jehangir Pocha

  

  From In These Times:
  
  

  A new Chinese export has been spreading quietly across Asia and the United States: dust.

  Violent sandstorms from China’s expanding deserts have been battering numerous Chinese cities, and now their mustard-colored dust has begun reaching South Korea, Japan and the west coast of North America.

  “People dusting off their cars in California or Calgary often don’t realize the sand has come all the way from China,” says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington D.C., who was in Beijing recently. “There is a dustbowl developing in China that represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert of any place in the world and it’s affecting the world.” [Full Text]

  Read related article: “China Losing War With Advancing Deserts” from IECA, which says “Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China’s territory each year.”

  (Photo of Dunhuang)

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  • October 17, 2006 8:53 PM

• Despite Small Successes, China Struggles to Contain Spreading Deserts - Luis Ramirez

  

  From VOA News:

  For years, experts have warned of the giant dust bowl that is forming in northwestern China. Overgrazing, overuse of land, and drought have created what some agronomists say is the world’s biggest transformation of productive land into desert. Official estimates say the deserts, advancing by thousands of square kilometers a year, now make up between 18 and 27 percent of China’s surface. Experts in China’s rural communities say the phenomenon is contributing to massive migration and possibly threatening food production.

  Zhang, a 70-year-old farmer, stands in a cornfield, sifting a handful of powdery sand through his fingers.

  It is this light brown colored sand, Zhang says, that blew with the wind a few years ago and nearly buried his house here in Langtougou village, less than 200 kilometers from the capital, Beijing. [Full Text]

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  • July 31, 2006 5:02 PM