Thirsty nation

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, but just 8% of its freshwater, China is the thirstiest nation on earth. Some of its rivers no longer reach the sea, and half the country is in danger of drying out completely. But as Roger East reports, the crisis has unleashed a wave of fresh thinking, whose ripples are running well beyond water.

Last November’s chemical pollution disaster on the Songhua river in northern China propelled the country’s water problems into the news around the world. By no means the first of its kind, it caught the attention because of its scale - depriving millions of people in and around Harbin of drinkable water for several days - and its extent, threatening to spread toxic contamination downstream into Russia. Even more alarmingly for the Chinese authorities, it also provoked the kind of public anxiety that the country’s stability-conscious leaders know they cannot afford to ignore.

In the wake of this disaster, the head of the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) was replaced. His successor, Zhou Shengxian, was swift to offer reassurance, promising safety inspections and stricter monitoring of the 21,000 chemical factories located along the country’s rivers and coastline. “The Chinese government,” he told a press conference in January, “has made a very timely and determined decision to stop the conventional approach of development, which could be characterised as ‘pollution and destruction first, treatment later’.”

Five months later, SEPA’s latest report on its activities and priorities gave pride of place to controlling water pollution as China’s most important environmental task, with a particular focus on providing drinking-water security. And just a month after that, in July 2006, action on water pollution was top of the government’s list of environmental spending priorities. In particular, He Bingguang of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) promised sewage treatment work on an unprecedented scale, within an overall environmental investment programme amounting to 1,400 billion yuan - or some 1.5% of China’s GDP for the next five years.

But such improvements, vital as they are, can only tackle part of the problem. The bottom line is that China has just 8% of the world’s fresh water to meet the needs of 22% of the planet’s population - and, in the words of the Worldwatch Institute, “virtually the entire northern half of the country is drying out”.

Clearly, China can’t afford to go on wasting this scarce resource by polluting its rivers and groundwater as it has done. Facing up to the true cost of water must be part of any more sustainable equation. Historically, it has been kept so cheap at the point of use that there was little incentive to treat it as a scarce resource. But that’s starting to change. Take Beijing, one of the cities that suffers the most acute water stress, with only one eighth of the national average volume of water per person. In the last 15 years, it’s raised its residential water prices more than twentyfold. Industry is facing the prospect of more realistic charges too. And this April, new rules came in governing water use in agriculture, which still accounts for almost two-thirds of total consumption. Farmers can still take freely from their own ponds for personal consumption, but permits and charges are being more rigorously applied for abstraction from rivers, lakes and underground supplies. Progress is under way too, in the form of more efficient irrigation methods to replace the notoriously wasteful flood irrigation which is still so widely used.

Cleaning up in Chongqing

The city of Chongqing has grown accustomed to dumping four tonnes of untreated waste into the Yangtze every minute, and letting it all be flushed away by the flow of the river. But the completion of the dam at Three Gorges, 350km downstream, threatens to turn Chongqing’s enormous flushing toilet into a slow-moving cesspool. Hence the city’s need to invest heavily in sewage and garbage systems. Cao Guanghui, director of the local Environmental Protection Bureau, reckons the infrastructure will run to over 100 treatment plants, at a cost of some $5 billion - cutting the proportion of waste water that the city releases untreated from 80% to 30%. Replicated around the country, this cleanup is set to be one of the big opportunities for foreign investment and technology in China over the next few years.

It is typical of the Chinese leadership that it sees large-scale engineering as part of the answer. Its huge and controversial hydro-electric dam projects, epitomised by the Three Gorges, aim to contribute to water supply management as well as meeting power needs. But even these are put in the shade by the size and ambition of the recently launched South-North Water Diversion Project. This massive undertaking is intended for completion by 2050 at an expected cost of almost 500 billion yuan. The idea is to tap into the relatively plentiful water of the Yangtze river system to bring relief - to the tune of 45 billion cubic metres of water a year - to the parched north.

Many environmentalists doubt that the Yangtze system can afford to be deprived of this much flow. Others worry, too, that water losses en route will be punitively high. But no-one could dispute that the north sorely needs the water. Problems of inadequate supplies there have been exacerbated by environmental degradation and a five-fold increase in the use of river water for irrigation.

The South-North water diversion project may involve massive expense and engineering skill, but that has not saved it from being likened to “a cup of water to put out a bonfire - not enough to quench the thirst”. Those are the words of Ma Jun, whose book, China’s Water Crisis, made him one of the country’s best known and most influential environmentalists. Ma sees water shortage as such a potent time bomb that some cities around Beijing and Tianjin will have no water left in just five to seven years.

Hence the importance of some of the innovative solutions that are emerging around the country. Meeting its water challenge will require all the ingenuity, traditional wisdom and technological expertise that can be mustered, both from China’s own experience, and from international co-operation.

THE RIVER THAT RAN SHORT OF THE SEAThe once mighty Yellow River (or Huang He) has become an emblem of China’s water problems. It is now so sluggish and silted up along its 5,500km journey from the Tibetan plateau that for much of the year it no longer reaches the sea at all. By a cruel irony, it remains highly susceptible to disastrous flooding in the wetter months. Unpredictable at best, it has now raised its riverbed so much by depositing silt, that it runs several metres above the surrounding land. This so-called ‘hanging river’ phenomenon means it needs a constantly reinforced system of dykes to keep it in its channel. The Ministry of Water Resources is now proposing a massive programme to build ‘warping dams’ to reduce sedimentation, as well as steps to cut irrigation demand and reduce the discharge of effluents.

The Yellow River’s mythic importance for the Chinese, as the cradle of their ancient civilisation, makes its parlous current condition especially poignant. All the more crucial, then, is the health of the country’s other great waterway, the Yangtze. A holistic approach to preserving and restoring its ‘web of life’, in the face of all the pressures of land reclamation, urbanisation and runaway economic growth, lies at the heart of WWF-China’s Yangtze Programme (which is supported financially by global banking organisation HSBC).

This June, the organisation celebrated the successful re-linking to the river of eight cut-off lakes in the Anqing region. The opening of the sluice gates brought a surge of optimism about the eventual large-scale reconnection of the central and lower Yangtze, with the hope of healing degraded wetland systems - to the benefit both of the wildlife and the people who depend on the river’s resources. As WWF-China’s Zhu Jiang says: “The lakes will once again be able to act as natural sponges, absorbing water during the flood seasons, releasing it during the dry season, and purifying it all year around.”

WWF-China’s initiative had already seen the reconnection of four lakes the previous year. And its principles have been formally incorporated in national policy, which now emphasises the value of re-stocking lakes with fish in tandem with the restoration of their links with river systems.

A HARVEST FULL OF RAINGansu is one of China’s driest provinces, so it’s not surprising that it has led the way on rainwater harvesting. Since the mid-90s, local authorities have given subsidies to help rural households set up water collection systems on roofs and courtyards, linked to underground storage tanks. Families quickly found they were saving some 70 days’ worth of water-carrying time per year, and had enough water to grow cash crops in greenhouses and orchards. The Gansu model has spread fast across the country, and tens of millions of households now harvest the rain, Gansu-style. The system has even been exported abroad, thanks to training programmes run by the Gansu Research Institute for Water Conservancy, which carried out the initial pilot projects back in the early 1990s.

There’s growing interest, too, in Beijing, where rainwater harvesting could add 230 million cubic metres a year to the capital’s chronically inadequate water supplies, according to the local water authority. That could not only all but wipe out the need for excessive use of the city’s dwindling groundwater supplies - it could also alleviate flooding and pollution from rainwater runoff. Various pilot schemes are now in place, using rainwater collected from rooftops and roads to flush toilets and wash cars. It’s presently too expensive for retrofitting on existing streets and housing, but it’s starting to catch on for ‘waterscaping’ in new developments.

Snow cellars
Meanwhile, when it comes to meeting local demand, few solutions could be simpler than the ancient practice of storing quantities of snow. Now it’s being revived on the fringes of the Gobi desert, where people are encouraged to build large concrete cellars in or near their houses, packing in the winter snow which will melt back to water in the hot, dry summer.

TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT: Yanan City In Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow’s account of his travels on Mao’s Long March in the 1930s, he wrote of the mighty surge of the Yanhe river as it cascaded through Yanan, the cradle of the revolution. Now a modern road bridge crosses an expanse of sand; the surge reduced to a trickle under a single span - and this in April, when snowmelt and spring rain might be expected to fill the bed to the brim. The hazy skies are caused by China’s all too familiar cocktail of dust storms and pollution.
Martin Wright

2 November 2006

Roger East