Water Warnings
Urgent Tasks for China
Water has long been considered an inexhaustible resource. But China is facing an utakable water cr, and recently, because of increasingly hard-to-miss symptoms of the shortage, people in all parts of society are beginning to realize just how precious commodity water really is.
At first glance, it seems like there should be enough: China’s total supply of freshwater resources ranks sixth in the world, after Brazil, Russia, Canada, the United States and Indonesia. But despite this apparent advantage, China’s per capita water resources fall far below the world average of 7,600 cubic meters per-capita due to the country’s enormous population size. China’s per-capita amount of 2,200 cubic meters is expected to decrease further as the country continues its rapid economic growth and population expansion.
"Without excessively exploiting underground water, China has a water gap of nearly 40 billion cubic meters. The country’s 320 million rural people aren’t able to drink safe water and over 400 cities don’t have sufficient water supply, 110 of which face a serious shortage," Wang Shucheng, Minister of Water Resources, said recently.
Some water resources experts warn that the current shortage is no more than a warning signal, with a greater cr yet to come. The Ministry of Water Resources issued a water cr warning as early as November 2001. At the time it said that when the Chinese population peaks at 1.6 billion in 2030, China’s per-capita water resources could fall to 1,700 cubic meters, the internationally acknowledged level below which an area is said to be experiencing "water stress".
Poor Natural Conditions
Scant water resources to slake the thirsts of a population of 1.3 billion, and the uneven geographical distribution of these resources, form the basis of water conditions in China.
Affected by monsoons (季候风), China’s precipitation (降水量) varies considerably among different
seasons. The time of precipitation overlaps (交迭) with the hottest seasons, mostly in summer and autumn and scarcely in winter and spring. Generally, regions with the lowest precipitation levels receive it concentratedly only at certain times of the year, which easily gives rise to drought in spring and flooding in summer. Meanwhile, two thirds of China’s water resources is comprised of runoff flooding, which means rivers often flood in the rainy season and dry up at other times.
China’s water resources are also distributed geographically unevenly, inconsistent with the distribution of land, mineral resources and productivity. Generally, water resources are concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of the country, and in mountainous areas. Annual precipitation amounts vary from more than 3,000 millimeters in the southeast to less than 50 millimeters in the northwest.
China is prone to floods and droughts, such-as the severe drought that hit Chongqing and Sichuan in southwest China this summer, the country’s worst in 50 years. While per capita water resources in some areas of the north approach the level of the driest countries in the world, the water-rich south often suffers from seasonal droughts, which adversely affects rice, the major crop reliant on watering, as well as other cash crops. The last two decades have seen a nominal change in the country’s suce water resources and total water resources. Yet clue to factors such as global climate change and river drainage, and total water resources in south China are rising while water resources in the north are falling significantly.
A Series of Measures Adopted by Chinese Government
Against these difficult conditions, the Chinese Government has taken a series of measures to try and guarantee the basic water demands necessary for daily life and social and economic development. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the state has built a total of 85,000 reservoirs, with a total reserve capacity of over 500 billion cubic meters.
Recently the government began to restore the longest c in the world, built 1,400 years ago. The Grand C, which starts from the northern end of Beijing and ends in the southeastern city of Hang Zhou, near Shanghai, still runs today for 1,794 kilometers.
As well, the government has initiated a plan to build new cs to channel water from south to north, though the project also involves land requisition and the resettlement of people living along some parts of the proposed cs. The south to north water transfer project, China’s largest ever water project, involves an estimated investment of 500 billion Yuan and proposes to move 44 billion cubic meters of water per year through three transfer cs, from the Yangtze River Basin to north China.
Serious Waste
For a long time, the phenomena of serious water shortage and low efficiency in water usage, or even waste of water, have coexisted in China.
In terms of efficiency of water usage in agriculture, China’s average grain output per cubic meter of irrigation water is about 1 kilogram while that of advanced countries is 2.5 to 3 kilograms. For the time being, the majority of China’s farmland is continuing to adopt the old method of flood irrigation. The amount of farmland using water conservation technologies in irrigation accounts for just 35 percent of the effectively irrigated farmland, as compared to over 80 percent in some developed countries.
In terms of water efficiency in industry, the major problem is a low recycling rate. Statistics from 2004 show that China’s water consumption per 10,000 yuan worth of CDP was 399 cubic meters, four times the world average level and eight times that of industrialized countries; for 10,000 yuan worth of added industrial value, China’s water consumption was 196 cubic meters and China’s recycling rate of industrial water was between 60 to 65 percent, while the figures for industrialized countries were below 50 cubic meters and 80 to 85 percent respectively.
The waste of water is particularly serious in people’s daily lives. A large amount of wastewater from washing cars, watering grass or washing hair in salons flows away without recycling. According to rough estimates, 20 percent of China’s tap water leaks due to aging pipes, which is more than double the amount in cities of developed countries. More and more Chinese people are drinking purified water instead of boiled tap water out of health concerns or for the sake of convenience. But few people know that some purified water manufacturers use outdated equipment and technology, meaning that only 1 ton of purified water is produced from 3 to 4 tons of source water.
Besides water waste, overuse of water is also exerting strains on resources. Some regions in northern China are actually using water required by the natural environment and ecological systems to sustain social and economic development. The number of cities and well irrigation areas in the countryside, which excessively exploit ground water, has grown from 56 at the beginning of the 1980s to more than 160 at present. The area of overuse has grown from 87,000 square kilometers to over 180,000 square kilometers, resulting in ecological disasters such as ground sinkage, water hardening and backflow of seawater.
Creating a Water-saving Society
Facing the harsh reality of the country’s water situation, some Chinese cities have strived to conserve water. Cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao have built several model projects of producing renewed water from sewage, laying the foundation for promoting the production and use of renewed water in China.
"If further efforts in conserving water are made and one third of the water consumed by cities is recycled and reused, the amount saved would equal the total water amount of the newly built c, ’ said Qiu Baoxing, Vice Minister of Construction.
Li Lifeng is the director of the fresh water project for the Beijing office of World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a global environmental conservation organization. He thinks China still needs to overthrow the traditional project-oriented management and usage models of water resources, implement measures of low-pollution production and ways of building a water-saving society, as well as take advantage of the ecological system in holding and cleansing water and pring flooding.
Minister of Water Resources Wang Shucheng pointed out, "Building a water conserving society, which consists of water conservation campaigns and enhancement of efficiency of water resources, is indispensable in guaranteeing China’s sustainable development."
He explained that the efforts to build a water-conserving society go beyond promoting the conservation of water. Wang said that different from the traditional water conservation campaigns that focused mostly on water-saving projects, equipment and technologies and relied essentially on government’s administrative means, building a water-conserving society mainly requires the formulation of mechanisms and economic incentives. He noted that through influencing the production process, China’s economic growth mode could be transformed and the country put on a path of resources-friendly and environment-friendly development.
In the south of China the water is sufficient for the major crops.