It found that China currently has 22,909 rivers that each covers an area of more than 100 square kilometers, some 28,000 fewer than were counted during the 1990s.

[…] “Overexploitation of water resources and pollution are the two major problems. With demand from the industry and urban consumption increasing, the water supply is already being severely challenged, especially in North China,” Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Global Times.

The national strategy should shift from increasing water supply to conservation and more efficient use of water, Ma added.

Marking the completion of the first phase of China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project, Scott Moore expanded on Ma’s advice in an op-ed at The New York Times:

In realizing Mao’s dream of moving huge quantities of water from areas of plenty to those of want, Beijing is building a modern marvel, this century’s equivalent of the Panama Canal. But whereas the canal inaugurated a century of faith in the ability of human ingenuity to reshape the natural world, the South-North Water Transfer Project is a testament to the limits of engineering solutions to problems of basic environmental scarcity.

[…] Ultimately, China needs significant political reform to meet the challenge of water scarcity. In order to make difficult decisions about who gets how much water, the country needs robust, transparent and participatory decision-making mechanisms. Moreover, in order to make policy ideas like water-rights reform work, the legal system and the rule of law must be strengthened. Finally, Beijing needs to stop relying on technology to avoid making hard choices about scarce resources. The United States and the rest of the world need to push the Chinese government to make its development more sustainable through political reform, lest China’s economy and social stability be endangered.

A 2011 Q&A with Kenneth Pomeranz at The China Beat (RIP) similarly challenged Beijing’s reliance on epic engineering over “fixing a million leaky faucets” (via CDT).

According to a separate study by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, meanwhile, 44% of shallow groundwater in the North China Plains is polluted, and little more than a fifth can be drunk without treatment. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz counseled optimism:

Try to see it as a glass 1/5th full. @raykwong Marvelous. 1/5 of shallow groundwater in N China Plains drinkable. bit.ly/ZtUmWi

— Rob Schmitz (@rob_schmitz) March 27, 2013

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Chinese officials are fond of grandiose engineering projects. After more than a decade of toil, one of the biggest since the construction of the Great Wall is close to achieving what they like to call a “decisive victory”. In coming months, canals and pipelines hundreds of kilometres long will bring water from the Yangzi River basin to the parched north. But growing demand is forcing officials to look for other sources. A promising one, they believe, is the sea.

[…] In its first five-year plan for the industry, in December, the government insisted that desalination was “of benefit to sustainable development”. It was better, it argued, than sucking more water out of the north’s fast-diminishing aquifers. That is surely right. Yet desalinating water uses enormous amounts of energy, which comes mainly from highly polluting coal (though Beijiang’s advanced technology is more efficient than that found in standard power plants). And diverting water from the river basin could exacerbate the impact of droughts in the south. No wonder that environmentalists complain that the government is relying on costly remedies, and doing too little to encourage conservation.

Historian Kenneth Pomeranz suggested in 2011 “that if you put anything like the cost of the South-North water diversion project into fixing a million leaky faucets, lining a million unlined irrigation ditches […] etc., etc., you could do more to alleviate the problem (and more safely) than the diversion project will do.”

In fact, “China is becoming a global hub of environmental experimentation” in water conservation, according to environmental economist Michael Bennett. But these innovative measures are limited in scope and forced to compete with the official penchant for Pharaonic engineering. At chinadialogue last month, Olivia Boyd examined China’s “split personality”:

One pressing question is whether the elements of government pushing for a continued emphasis on heavy engineering can be tamed. As impressive as China’s efforts to preserve its water resources may be, recent history holds a litany of controversial water-management schemes: the Three Gorges Dam, the South-North water transfer scheme and even an idea to pump sea water from the Bohai Gulf to Inner Mongolia to feed thirsty coal plants.

The South-North project currently tops the list. This Mao-era dream to divert water north from the Yangtze River, now under construction, has been criticised by economists and environmentalists for its expense, impacts on agriculture and mass relocations of communities, among other issues. Many, including Bennett, argue the government would do better to reform water pricing so that downtown hotels in parched Beijing no longer gush water from grand fountains, or golf courses guzzle resources keeping their courses green.

“The government has multiple personalities and one of them is obviously this pour more cement, create more infrastructure to solve water problems kind of approach,” says Bennett. “But there’s definitely a growing voice that says no, we need to price water accordingly, we need to invest proactively in improving the efficiency of how we use water.”

A Greenpeace investigation following a chemical spill in Shanxi in December highlighted the scale of the challenge. From Didi Kirsten Tatlow at IHT Rendezvous:

[…] Greenpeace found that the fast pace of water consumption by coal and chemical industries in the area is drying up all water resources further downstream. In fact, by 2015, water consumption by coal and chemical industry in China’s dry, western areas is set to use up a whopping quarter of the water flowing annually in the nearby Yellow River, which forms much of the border of Shanxi Province and is popularly known as China’s “Mother River,” wrote chinadialogue.

As chinadialogue wrote, citing Greenpeace, “Even more worrying than the chemical leak is the high water consumption of the coal and chemical industries in the area.”

[…] None of this may be news to hardened followers of China’s crumpling environment, but the scale of the water consumption in the water-scarce area is nonetheless shocking: The Tianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, which caused the spill, consumes water equivalent to the consumption of about 300,000 people per year, chinadialogue wrote, citing the Greenpeace investigation.

The Yellow and other rivers now carry so much pollution and so little water to the Bohai—from which the Beijiang desalination plant in the Economist article draws its water—that the sea is in danger of ecological collapse.

See more on water shortages and the South-North Water Diversion project on CDT.

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The film features interview segments with Ma Jun of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs on China’s water “time bomb”. Groundwater extraction lowered the water table in Hebei by 130 feet between 1996 and 2006, and with inadequate supplies, there is not enough clean water to reclaim the polluted. The real extent of the problem is unknown, Ma says: while 90% of the shallow groundwater flowing through the cities is thought to be polluted, no complete data exists.

Local officials did eventually come up with a solution of sorts for the farmers’ plight: they confiscated the land on which the orchard had stood.

The film ends on an optimistic note regarding the South-to-North Water Diversion project. In addition to long-standing doubts about its practicality, however, severe droughts in southern China have raised questions about the core assumption underlying the scheme.

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Though some critics argue the Chinese government has been too slow to act, research, public concern and some hefty bills ($35 billion in Shanghai alone in the last 40 years), has sparked some momentum. Recently, the state council approved China’s Land Subsidence Prevention Project, a countrywide initiative to prevent land subsidence. Likewise, Beijing, which has descended more than a foot in the past decade, has also made an effort to reduce underground water extraction, with plans to close 800 water extraction wells in 2012, according to the Beijing Water Authority. By 2014, the city hopes to halt underground water extraction in urban areas altogether as part of the North-South Water Diversion Project. The project expects to bring 3 billion cubic feet of water supply to Beijing from the Yangtze River. This would not only satisfy one-third of the city’s total water demand, but would also cut the extraction of underground water in half.

But Li, who worked at the Chinese Academy of Science for 15 years, says such programs will not be enough. “It’s hard to quantify how much this might help, but the question is, is that a problem solved? The answer is no. The problem lies in the early issue with urbanization,” he says. Scientists expect the regulations to help curb the consumption of underground water supplies, but there a few things the government has less control over, such as global warming. As the land degradation and excessive guzzling of ground water continues, environmentalists predict waters surrounding Shanghai to rise 9 to 27 inches by 2050 as a result of melting ice caps.

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The river systems of Yunnan and Guizhou figure only modestly in the planned supply chain of the South-North Water Diversion Project. But if the causes of the drought in these provinces have to do with changing global climate patterns, the main assumption underlying the project—that of permanent water abundance in the south—may not hold up.

Liu Xiaokang of the Yunnan Green Environment Development Foundation, an NGO in Kunming, believes the causes are mixed. Global climate may be affecting patterns of precipitation, he says. But his group also notes that the parts of Yunnan that are hardest hit are those where development has been fastest and deforestation most extensive ….

… Professor Jiang Tong [of China’s National Climate Centre] warns of problems with the transfer project if both south and north suffer drought at the same time. The situation, he adds, is complicated by the Yangzi’s Three Gorges dam. It provides massive amounts of hydroelectricity to the Yangzi basin. He is concerned about what will happen should Shanghai need more power at the same time that Beijing needs more water.

See more on China’s droughts and their effects, from power shortages in the industrial Pearl River Delta to spiking food prices around the world, via CDT.

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Tunnelling expert Professor Wang Mengshu of Beijing Jiaotong University, who is also a member of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering, said he saw too much ambition and too little practicality in the land ministry’s plan ….

Professor Feng Zhiming, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, said pumping water underground was too costly for most mainland cities ….

Jiang [Mingjing, who teaches underground engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai] said Beijing’s most urgent task was not to stop land subsistence, but to set up a network to monitor sensitive areas and buildings.

“A city may take centuries to sink, but a skyscraper can collapse overnight,” he said. “We must have some focus, or we will be lost.”

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Visitors to Wang Baoying’s new house must tread softly or they will frighten her son. The four-year-old boy is not afraid of strangers. He is terrified his home will fall down.

This is not just the fear of a childish imagination. Wang’s concrete home – built this year to resettle migrants from China’s latest and greatest hydro-engineering project – wobbles when she walks. Her neighbour’s floor has completely collapsed. Another’s bedroom is tilting. There are cracks on many of the walls ….

The former farmer is one of 345,000 people who are being relocated in a desperate bid to ease Beijing’s drought crisis with a transfusion of water from the Yangtze basin, 1,277km to the south. Her old home and farmland will soon be flooded by the central leg of three vast channels that make up the £40bn South-North water diversion, a 50-year project to replenish the arid north of China. According to US diplomatic cables released via WikiLeaks last week, the project is plagued by pollution and misconceived.

Though Wang cried when she left her home in Xichuan, village leaders and propaganda slogans assured her the sacrifice was necessary for the nation. Migrants have also been promised new homes, compensation and farmland. But the reality, as many are discovering, is shoddily constructed housing, money that has been skimmed by officials, no jobs and a cold welcome from existing locals who are reluctant to share their property.

The article is accompanied by a set of photos showing the affected area. Previously via CDT, ‘China’s Biggest Relocation Project Yet‘ examined similar relocations in Shaanxi, while ‘China’s Coal Rush Leaves Three Million Living on the Edge focused on those displaced by mining in Shanxi.

Sources:

China water resettlement: ‘Honest folk have lost out’ – guardian.co.uk
China’s South-North water diversion resettlement – in pictures – guardian.co.uk

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Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other co-operative institutional mechanisms has proved unsuccessful so far in any basin. Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra or Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations ….

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already clear. First, China is in water disputes with almost all its neighbours, from Russia and India to weak client-states such as North Korea and Burma. Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by protests against Chinese rule. Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

The Financial Times has also reviewed Chellaney’s book, ‘Water: Asia’s New Battleground‘, alongside two others on China’s rise and its international context. Chellaney regards Indian recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet as a strategic error in terms of water security, warning that strong diplomacy is vital to avoiding conflict over water resources in the future.

For details of Chinese proposals to dam upstream of the Indian border (which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied are part of official plans), see Chinese Engineers Eye Tibetan Rivers.

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In Oman, a Middle Eastern desert country where water is scarce, it is understood to be more valuable. There, farmers trade water rights. As Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestle SA, has pointed out, farmers are in the best possible position to know water’s value. Pricing it through tradable rights or other mechanisms “is an extremely strong incentive to use water efficiently,” Brabeck-Letmathe said in an interview with the McKinsey Quarterly.

The academic literature bears out his point. In a July 2007 study, Sheila Olmstead of Yale University and Robert Stavins of Harvard University concluded that using prices to manage water demand was more cost-effective than conservation programs not linked to price, such as restrictions on watering the lawn and subsidies for low-flow faucets ….

The Chinese people are willing to pay more for water, the World Bank reports, “as long as the quality of the service is good and the tariff level acceptable.” And yet prices in China are still much too low to ensure that the water is used efficiently enough to sustain the supply. Higher prices would persuade people to both reduce waste and improve the allocation of water across all its possible uses (including in the energy sector). It would also encourage more investment in desalination and other measures to increase supply.

The benefits and challenges of promoting water efficiency were discussed in The China Beat’s recent Q & A with environmental historian Kenneth Pomeranz:

Probably most of the water savings that you could achieve without greatly reducing economic output are in agriculture, where a lot of irrigation is very inefficient (and not just in China); in fact, I think there’s a good case to be made that if you put anything like the cost of the South-North water diversion project into fixing a million leaky faucets, lining a million unlined irrigation ditches, enforcing existing wastewater treatment standards (allowing more water to be re-used), etc., etc., you could do more to alleviate the problem …

…[One] way to strongly encourage local compliance in saving water is to make water more expensive – but this would hit farmers hardest, and the government is genuinely concerned about how far farmers’ incomes lag behind most other people’s already. Do you really want to increase that gap further …?

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The world’s population tripled in the 20th century, but the thirst for water grew six-fold, the large majority sprinkled on fields. The UN predicts that, by 2025, two-thirds of us will experience water shortages, with nearly two billion suffering severe shortfalls. Today China, struck by terrible droughts in its agricultural heartlands, is the world’s biggest importer of “virtual water”: the billions of tonnes of water used to produce the food and other goods brought into the world’s most populous nation.

China, along with other water-stressed nations such as Saudi Arabia and South Korea, has sought to cut out the middlemen and acquire land in wetter places for themselves in order to grow and send food home. The so-called “land grabs” across the global south are the result ….

Desalination – with 14,000 plants already in existence – is one solution that is growing fast, but is energy-intensive, expensive and heavy on carbon. Even the few trials of solar-powered desalination plants will leave hypersaline water polluting the seas. Mega-engineering projects, such as China’s 50-year south-north water-diversion scheme, might also offer relief, at vast cost. And none of these address the other water problem: the lack of clean water and sanitation in wet nations too poor to provide them.

Carrington’s emphasis on the limits of epic mega-projects echoes Kenneth Pomeranz’s comments in a recent Q&A at The China Beat.

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JW: You’ve been interviewed a lot lately by journalists. Do you feel you get asked the right kinds of questions about the water situation? Or, to put it another way, is there a question you wish you’d be asked–or asked more often?

KP: I think journalists have generally asked me the right questions, but of course they almost never have space to print the whole interview (if “print” is even the right verb these days), and I’m sometimes surprised by which parts of it they think are most worth using. If it were up to me, I think I’d focus more on the link between water problems and rural/urban issues, the connections between water shortages and poor enforcement of environmental regulations, and the ways that both of these are related to tensions between different levels of government. Probably most of the water savings that you could achieve without greatly reducing economic output are in agriculture, where a lot of irrigation is very inefficient (and not just in China); in fact, I think there’s a good case to be made that if you put anything like the cost of the South-North water diversion project into fixing a million leaky faucets, lining a million unlined irrigation ditches, enforcing existing wastewater treatment standards (allowing more water to be re-used), etc., etc., you could do more to alleviate the problem (and more safely) than the diversion project will do. But for Beijing there are at least two problems with that.

First, a huge construction project like the diversion is something they can oversee directly; making sure a million pipes get fixed and rules get enforced requires a lot more reliance on local government, and they can’t necessarily count on that …. Second, one way to strongly encourage local compliance in saving water is to make water more expensive – but this would hit farmers hardest, and the government is genuinely concerned about how far farmers’ incomes lag behind most other people’s already. Do you really want to increase that gap further …?

Good journalists certainly know that China’s central government is much more limited than most Westerners realize, but I think they don’t emphasize that often enough – it’s a hard idea for people to shake, so maybe you have to push the point even harder than a particular individual story really requires. But if the cumulative effect of emphasizing that again and again were to break more people of the idea that Beijing is an all-powerful juggernaut, this would be of tremendous benefit to public understanding of China. Focusing on the mega-projects themselves, on the other hand, tends to reinforce the idea of an enormous concentration of power at the center.

One such mega-project, reported yesterday on CDT, is the proposed diversion of billions of cubic metres of water from the Yarlung Zangbo/Brahmaputra river upstream of the Indian border. But Chinese authorities have denied any intention of executing the scheme. From The Hindu:

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said in response to a question on India’s concerns about a diversion plan that China adopted “a responsible attitude towards the development of cross border water resources.”

“We adopt a policy that protection goes together with development, and take into full consideration the interests of downstream countries,” Mr. Hong said.

Recent media reports in India suggested China was considering a plan to divert the river’s waters, citing comments from Wang Guangqian, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

But other experts The Hindu spoke to said the government had not considered Mr. Wang’s – and others’ – proposals to divert the waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet, citing the heavy costs involved and technical difficulties of such a project.

They stressed Mr. Wang’s proposal was not new — he had proposed a diversion plan as early as in 2001.

The article notes, however, “there is growing consensus for developing hydropower [as opposed to diversion] projects in the upper reaches.”

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Freshwater quality

Ministry of Environmental Protection:

“Surface water pollution across the country is still relatively grave … 59.9 percent of rivers were grade 3 or better, 23.7 percent of rivers were grade 4 or 5 and 16.4 percent failed to meet any grade standard. Among 26 lakes or reservoirs, 42.3 percent are affected by eutrophication.”

Interpretation: Two-fifths percent of river water can make you sick. This includes a sixth that is so contaminated it is not fit for any use. Four in every 10 lakes are turning green and choked by algae

Grade: F

Drought and dams

Ministry:

“Hebei, Jiangxi and Hunan are in the midst of severe drought. The main reason is a lack of precipitation … The water in some large lakes has fallen to a level rarely seen in history … We believe this will have a big impact on environmental and ecological protection.”

Interpretation: OK. It may sound obvious that droughts are caused by a lack of rain, but I am saying this so you don’t blame the Three Gorges Dam, the South-North Water Diversion Project or any other massive hydro-engineering project.

Grade: D-. Kudos for mentioning the ecological impact, which is often overlooked in assessment of the loss of drinking water, irrigation supplies and hydropower capacity. But this dodges the man-made factors that could be exacerbating the situation.

Overall, Watts gives a dismal D+ for effort and E for outcomes. However:

… I sympathise with the Ministry of Environment Protection, which faces one of the world’s biggest challenges. Many of the country’s problems can be attributable to its stage of development and wider global trends. When assessing China, there are always two comparisons to make: horizontal (with current top level world standards) and vertical (with its own past performance). They produce very different results.

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The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.

Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.

“Look at this dead yellow earth,” said Li Jiaying, 67, a hunched woman hobbling to her new concrete home clutching a sickle and a bundle of dry sticks for firewood. “Our old home wasn’t even being flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No one wanted to leave.”

In addition to forced relocations, the project has a number of other environmental and social risks, the article continues:

[...] The central question for people in Hubei is whether the Han River, crucial to farming and industrial production hubs, will be killed to keep north China alive.

In a paper published in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mr. Du and two co-authors estimated that the diversion project would reduce the flow of the middle and lower stretches of the Han significantly, “leading to an uphill situation for the prevention of water pollution and ecological protection.” Though the study first appeared in 2006, the government has not altered its original plan, Mr. Du said.

Central planners decided on the amount of water to be diverted based on calculations of water flow in the Han done from the 1950s to the early 1990s; since then, the water flow has dropped, partly because of prolonged droughts, but planners have made no adjustments, Mr. Du said. The amount to be diverted is more than one-third of the annual water flow. “That will exert a huge damaging impact on the river,” he said.

The article also includes a video and a slideshow. Read more about the South-to-North Water Diversion Project via CDT.

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Residents of Xichuan County, Henan, which is located near the Danjiangkou Reservoir, will move to more than 80 resettlement sites in other parts of the province, said the Henan provincial headquarters for relocation in the water diversion project’s Danjiangkou Reservoir area.

The resettlement will take four months to complete, according to a statement released by the headquarters.

Henan previously relocated 11,000 residents living near the reservoir in 2009 and another 64,900 in 2010 ….

The middle route, which will be completed in 2014, involves the relocation of 345,000 people living in close proximity to the Danjiangkou Reservoir, the source of the middle route and administered by neighboring Hubei Province.

Read more about the South-North Water Diversion project and the displacement of communities by reservoirs via CDT. An LA Times article from late last year offers a good overview of the water diversion project and the range of different perspectives on it. See also International Rivers’ coverage of the project.

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As we talk, Wang buys a bottle of water and throws it away half-finished. “Don’t you want the rest?” I ask. She laughs. “It’s OK, there’s drinking water at work. It’s heavy and ruins the look of my bag. I just don’t believe the capital city will run out of water – just wait until the South-North Water Transfer Project is up and running. Then there’ll be nothing to worry about.”

Residents like Wang may be counting the days, or years, to completion of the government’s mega transfer project, a multibillion dollar infrastructure scheme that plans to draw water from rivers in the south of China and pump it to the dry north. But will it really solve the capital’s growing water problems and allow the residents to carry on carelessly wasting water? Everyone is calling for “sustainable development”, but what does that actually mean when it comes to curing Beijing’s chronic water shortages?

Yin Mingwan is senior engineer at the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research. In an interview, he explained to me that the transfer project is just a short-term solution: “Just because there’s demand doesn’t necessarily mean there’s supply to satisfy it, particularly when it comes to water. The transfer project will relieve Beijing’s water shortage for quite some time into the future, and there’ll be no risk of ‘drought’, but it’s not a permanent solution.

“If we don’t plan and manage water consumption, if we just allow a constant and unlimited increase in water demand, one day we’ll reach a point where water shortages are placing limits on urban expansion and social and economic development.”

See also Olli Geibel’s previously featured photographs documenting the state of Beijing’s water resources, and an overview of the South-North Water Diversion which shows a range of different expectations for the project.

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