Where China's Rivers Run Dry

This report begs the question: At what price progress?
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Where China's Rivers Run Dry

By Orville Schell
Newsweek

April 16, 2007 issue - The view from the top of the luxurious Morgan Centre (which will soon host a seven-star hotel) down onto Beijing's Olympic Green, where the 2008 Summer Games will begin in less than 500 days, is breathtaking. There, far below, lies the stunning Herzog & de Meuron-designed "bird nest" Olympic Stadium. Right next to it is the equally mesmerizing National Aquatics Center, a square structure with bubbled blue translucent walls known as the Water Cube. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge has called this soon-to-be-completed sports complex "nothing short of staggering."

How successfully Beijing has turned the Games into a global coming-out party is—for anyone who, like me, came to know China when Mao still held sway—a mind-bending accomplishment. What has happened here in the intervening years is perhaps the most dramatic story of national transformation in human history. However, the environmental costs of China's hell-bent development have been severe. The Aquatics Center in particular poses one critical question: where will all the water to fill this bold but massive architectural masterpiece—and to supply the Games—come from? After all, Beijing sits on the parched North China Plain, one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with 65 percent of China's agriculture and only 24 percent of its water. Moreover, because only 278 of China's 661 major cities have sewage-treatment plants, 70 percent of the country's rivers are severely polluted.

One can drive a hundred miles in any direction from Beijing and never cross a healthy river. Heading north to Shanxi province, China's major producer of coal, one passes river after river that has dried up. And in 80 percent of those Shanxi rivers that are still flowing, water quality has been rated Grade V by Chinese officials, "unfit for human contact" or for agricultural or industrial use.

As you drive south across Hebei and Henan provinces, the cradle of Chinese civilization, the situation is no better. Reaching the famed Marco Polo Bridge over the Yongding River on a recent trip, we crossed our first parched riverbed. From there to the Yellow River, some 300 miles away, we traversed the Zhi, Ming, Anyang, Sha, Zhang, Huai and many other legendary rivers that show as blue lines on the map; all of them are now almost bone dry. All that remains to memorialize these watercourses are highway bridges, left behind like vestigial organs. The Yellow River itself, once known as "China's Sorrow" because of its propensity to flood, killing millions, has in Henan been reduced to a modest-size channel. At its lower reaches in Shandong, it is not uncommon for the river to cease flowing into the Bohai Sea altogether.

Locals seem pretty sure that these rivers—which have been dammed, diverted and pumped dry—may be gone forever: they've begun planting wheat and vegetables and building large polyethylene greenhouses on their flood plains. Some have even installed heavy equipment in the dry river bottoms to mine sand for China's dizzying construction boom.

What is the answer for the 250 million thirsty people who live on the North China Plain? Their per capita daily water use is only one eighth that of Americans, so there are limits to how much more they can conserve. Drought, possibly caused by climate change and overuse of riparian water, has forced farmers to turn to groundwater. But overextraction has caused water tables to fall by as much as 10 feet a year. So desperate officials have taken to making substantial investments in "precipitation-inducement technologies," or cloud seeding. Using aircraft, meteorological balloons and even rockets and artillery shells, they've been attempting to shoot passing clouds full of rainmaking chemicals. The China Meteorological Administration—which even has an Institute of Artificial Rain—reports that hundreds of aircraft and thousands of rockets and shells are used each year in the effort. Such campaigns have been only modestly successful and have created tensions between different localities, each claiming that clouds are being "intercepted" upwind by the other and their precious moisture stolen!

Then there is the monumental South-North Water Transfer Project, a $62.5 billion plan to move 50 billion cubic meters of water via three new diversion projects from the Yangtze River in the central part of the country to the North China Plain. The first phase of this Herculean project, the 722-mile-long Eastern Route along the old Grand Canal, is scheduled to come online later this year. But some environmentalists fear that shifting the increasingly polluted water of the Yangtze northward will also introduce a whole host of new toxic pollutants to the breadbasket of China.

No one knows what the consequences of all these Promethean efforts will be. For a century and a half, China's inability to defend itself against the industrialized world inculcated it with a deeply felt yearning to regain fuqiang, or "wealth and power." In the truly magnificent facilities being built for the Olympics, one can see a clear manifestation of this understandable urge to restore Chinese greatness. The question is whether China's limited natural-resource base can sustain the magnitude of such an ambition. With water, the country is confronting the edge of one very inflexible environmental envelope. Beijing's glorious Water Cube is a symbol both of China's remarkable accomplishments, and its all-too-pressing limits.

Schell is the Arthur Ross director at the Asia Society's Center for U.S.-China Relations.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. Subscribe to Newsweek

Warming Could Spark Water Scramble

Warming Could Spark Water Scramble

By Timothy Gardner Wed Apr 11, 6:42 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Climate change could diminish North American water supplies and trigger disputes between the United States and Canada over water reserves already stressed by industry and agriculture, U.N. experts said on Wednesday.

More heat waves like those that killed more than 100 people in the United States in 2006, storms like the killer hurricanes that struck the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 and wildfires are likely in North America as temperatures rise, according to a new report that provided regional details on a U.N. climate panel study on global warming issued in Brussels on April 6.

Severe weather already costs North America tens of billions of dollars annually in productivity and damaged property, and those costs are expected to rise, the U.N. report said. The broadest effects of climate change will be water problems across the entire continent -- including more frequent droughts, urban flooding and a scramble for water from the Great Lakes, which border both the United States and Canada.

"Water was an issue in every region ... but in very different ways and very different places," Michael MacCracken, a review editor of the report, said in a telephone interview.

Unlike many continents, North America has no east to west mountain ranges that limit droughts by forcing rapidly moving wet air to release rain, said MacCracken, also chief scientist for climate change at the Climate Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit group.

Cities will also be threatened as glacial melt leads to higher ocean levels. Late in the 21st century, severe flooding that occurs in New York once every 500 years could happen as often as once in 50 years, putting at risk much of the infrastructure in the New York region, the report said. Droughts would also occur more often in the U.S. Midwest and Southwest as warmer temperatures evaporate soil moisture.

Those droughts could diminish underground supplies like the Edwards Aquifer in Texas, which supplies 2 million people with water, by up to 40 percent, and cut levels of the Ogallala aquifer which underlies eight U.S. states, the report said. During droughts like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, U.S. farmers pumped water from underground aquifers to save their fields through irrigation. "Much of that water is now gone," said MacCracken. "We've used up our savings bank."

Tight underground water supplies could kick off a scramble for large above-ground supplies in the Great Lakes, the report said. Spats have already occurred over diversion of the lakes' water for distant cities and farms, while calls have increased for channeling water to the Mississippi River to supply U.S. cities during hot summers. Problems are also expected to intensify as warmer temperatures lower water levels through evaporation. "Climate change will exacerbate these issues and create new challenges for binational cooperation," the report said.
The tension could be heightened by the fact that a majority of the Canadian population lives close to the Great Lakes, while only a small fraction of the U.S. population reside nearby, MacCracken said.
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Keep taking water for granted.

Keep thinking it is an infinite source at your disposal for whatever leisurely activity you wish to engage in while others thirst for it.

Let it run from your faucets and spickets not giving a thought to what you are doing.

Fill your huge olympic sized swimming pools.

Water your lawns for hours on end.

Water your huge golf courses so that the rich have a place to play.

Keep buying the bottled water that makes huge American corporate conglomerates richer as they steal the sources of water from indigenous peoples.

And then dare to make others in this world believe you give a damn.

It seems to be the American way.... waste, selfishness, and not caring unless it effects you personally.

People in the arid Sub Saharan deserts and the Horn of Africa who see the rotting bones of their cattle that were their lives know the pain of having no water.

Those whose children are emaciated by famine know the cost of having no water.

Those who lost loved ones in Australia, India, and other places to drought through suicide because it took all they had including their spirits know the price of having no water.

Those farmers who lost crops to drought in the Southwest of our own country know the price of indifference.

Those in China who can now walk on the river beds of rivers that have evaporated as their environmental and life support have know the price of pollution and greed.

The land that cracks and bakes due to our waste and indifference to the climate and the forests know the cost of having no water.

Our Mother Earth that is crying for us to stop this insanity knows the cost of our continued greed and waste.

We here in America are not immune to the affects of our behavior any longer. It is time we learned that. It is way past time.

Water and Youth

Water and Youth
Afirming the right to water, the right to life!

We are youth from every corner of the planet who are launching projects linked to water; whether they be to guarantee the right to access to safe water, promote integrated management of basins, affect public policy, to promote a new water culture, etc. Looking at the wonderful experiences that have risen out of the minds and hands of youth, and taking into account the enormous power of transformation we are attaining, an idea emerged: to combine this energy to build a global youth movement in support of water.

Such an undertaking involves numerous challenges, among them, meeting one another and establishing connections; valuing different ways of seeing and understanding the world; systemizing, sharing and replicating initiatives; finding mechanisms for building consensus; creating one voice which influences decision-making processes.

EVENT

THE INTERNATIONAL MEETING
"WATER AND YOUTH"
Hotel Bauen,
Av Callao 360, Buenos Aires City
Argentine


AFFIRMING THE RIGHT TO WATER, THE RIGHT TO LIFE!

From the 12th to the 14th of April 2007, more than 400 young people highly involved on the water issue will join their voices in the First International Meeting "Water and Youth" to debate this subject. During these 3 days, the participants will share their successful experiences; and will define a new strategy in order to make changes in their communities.

This new platform is a unique opportunity to form dialog between the main figures of our society: several Ministers of Youth and Environment from different countries, as well as representatives of international organizations such as WHO, OIJ, organizations of the civil society and personalities recognized for by their actions toward environment and youth will be present during this meeting. The business world will also share its experience of environmental and social responsibility

Water and Youth ® - info@waterandyouth.org

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Our youth are our future. This initiative seeks to get youth involved in understanding the importance of a precious resource that is now in crisis. If you are interested, please go to the link above and find out what you can do in educating our youth and involving them in the solution.

Biofuels In Africa: Investment Boon Or Food Threat?

Biofuels in Africa: Investment Boon Or Food Threat?

Biofuels in Africa: Investment Boon or Food Threat?
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SOUTH AFRICA: April 4, 2007


JOHANNESBURG - Africa's vast arable lands have the potential to rival top agricultural nations like the United States in supplying biofuels to a world seeking cleaner energy sources.

But using land reserved for food production to supply biofuel demand could squeeze food supplies in a region vulnerable to shortages. It could also hurt poor consumers if the biofuel boom continues to push food prices higher. As alternative energy takes off, Africans hope to cash in on the high prices of the commodities used to produce these fuels.

Already, investors have pledged billions of dollars for plants to produce bioethanol and biodiesel from crops like sugar, maize and soy in Africa.

Ernst Janovsky, head of agriculture at First National Bank in Johannesburg, said the high rainfall belt between Angola, Zambia and Mozambique alone had the potential to rival the United States as a producer of maize used in bioethanol.

"It's almost as big as the size of the midwest of America. It has the same of type of potential and could actually outperform America," he told Reuters.

As is so often the case in Africa, however, there is one major obstacle to this kind of investment -- infrastructure. In Angola, for one, the land in question is covered by dense forest. Roads and manufacturing capacity have been wrecked by two decades of civil war.

Nevertheless, as the energy movement spreads and major agricultural powers find limits to their output, they may be forced to turn to Africa and be willing to spend money on setting up infrastructure, analysts say.

End of excerpt.
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I posted this for an obvious reason. Anything that is a food threat to Africa is also a water threat as most of the water used is for agriculture with much of it being wasted due to outdated methods, and ethanol production is known to use great amounts of water as well. And while I am a proponent of cellulosic ethanol I am not for designating fields just for production of crops to be used for it if it will in any way cause the poor to have a greater burden placed upon their food and water supplies than they already have. However, I fear that the allure of profit will blind companies to the other part of this equation, and we will not see prosperity come to these countries but only more exploitation.

I surely hope I am wrong as African nations and their people deserve a chance to for once be free to steer their own markets and to be able to trickle the profits down to the people who will benefit from them. However, again, water scarcity in Africa and drought is predicted to become much worse in the coming years. The IPCC is having its conference in Brussels this week, and on Friday April 6 will release their report regarding the impacts of climate change for the future by region.

This is what they predict for Africa:

IPCC

Impacts of Climate Change
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------INTERNATIONAL: April 2, 2007

Following are impacts of global warming outlined in a draft UN climate report due to be released in Brussels on April 6. The draft, to be discussed by scientists and government experts in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is looking at the regional effects of warming:

AFRICA --

Reductions in the area suitable for agriculture, and in length of growing seasons and yield potential, are likely to lead to increased risk of hunger. --

An increase of 5-8 percent (60-90 million hectares) of arid and semi-arid land in Africa is projected by the 2080s under various climate change scenarios. --

Current stress on water in many areas of Africa is likely to increase, with floods and droughts. --

Any changes in the productivity of large lakes are likely to affect local food supplies. --

Ecosystems in Africa are likely to experience dramatic changes with some species facing possible extinctions. --

Major delta regions with large populations, such as the Nile and Niger rivers, are threatened by sea level rises.
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Therefore, it is going to take more than planting crops to make biofuel to stop the runaway train that is already coming down the tracks. Climate change is already happening. Glaciers that millions around the world depend on for freshwater are already melting. Severe and prolonged droughts that are affecting food and water sustainability are already occuring in Africa and other parts of the world. We then need human intervention to reverse our own behavior that is contributing to this crisis and investment in other forms of renewable energy like solar to save land for the growing of crops to be used as food to feed the hungry as well as to provide affordable and accessible energy. If we do not conserve water as well as hold governments and corporations accountable for their mismanagement and greed to provide a proper balance, our solutions may just wind up becoming bigger problems.

Peru's Alarming Water Truth

Peru's Alarming Water Truth

By James Painter In Peru
Oscar-winning Al Gore chose to call his film about global warming An Inconvenient Truth. But for Peru it is more like an alarming reality.

Government officials, water experts and environmentalists agree the rapid melting of the spectacular Andean glaciers featured in the film is threatening the long-term economic and human development of what is South America's most "water-stressed" country.

"Global warming for us is not just about the environment," warns Julio Garcia of Peru's National Council on the Environment, Conam. "It's more about how on earth we can develop Peru in a sustainable way over the coming years."

Peru's water problem lies in part in the peculiar geography of the country. Most of the Pacific coast would be desert if it were not for the water flowing down from the Andes.

Seventy per cent of the population live along the coast, where less than 2% of the country's water resources are found. In contrast, the Atlantic side of the Andes has 98% of the water and about a quarter of the population.

snip:

A lot of attention has been paid to the range known as Cordillera Blanca, home to Peru's largest mountain, Huascaran, at 6,768 metres (22,200ft). Water coming down from the range feeds an array of economic activities in the Rio Santa valley below it. This includes a hydro-electric plant providing 5% of Peru's electricity, drinking water for two cities, and commercial and small-scale agriculture.

"Water from glaciers is absolutely critical for the valley in the six or seven months of the dry season," says Gabriela Rosas, a researcher at the national weather institute, Senamhi. Glacial melt is calculated to provide 10 to 20% of the total annual water run-off in the valley, but it can reach 40% in the dry season. Ms Rosas is part of a team modelling future water availability in Peru. The models, based on moderate rises in temperature, predict annual water availability will increase slightly as more of the glaciers melt, but that there will be a dramatic decline after 2050 and possibly as early as 2030. Seasonal variations will become more intense, with less water available in the dry season.

Lima, Peru's capital, is a particular worry.

The government wants more people to have water connections (Photo: Peru Support Group) It is built on a desert, supports a population of more than eight million, and receives hardly any rainfall. The city gets most of its water from the Rio Rimac and two other rivers with sources high up in the Andes. The rivers are partly fed by glacial melt, although less than the Rio Santa valley.

"Lima already has a large deficit between supply and demand and official projections say it's going to get a lot larger in the future," says Juan Carlos Barandiaran, former head of projects for the municipal water company, Sedapal. Demand is set to increase as the city absorbs thousands of new arrivals every year. "We must have more reserves," says Mr Barandiaran.

The last major drought in 2004 pushed the city's water supplies to the limit. "If we had droughts two years running our current reserves would not support it," he says. President Alan Garcia's government wants to give water connections to nearly a million more people in Lima, but experts say this will increase demand even more. The project is known as "Agua para todos" or "Water for all". But, says Sedapal's former president, Carlos Silvestri: "It will be very little water for all." For several years, Mr Silvestri and other experts have been urging successive governments to build a range of multi-million-dollar infrastructure works, including a second tunnel through the Andes, in order to build up their reserves.

Such works have become even more urgent with the prospect of reduced water in the dry season. They could capture and store more water during the wet season. "We are only city in South America with so few reserves - less than a year's supply. We are very vulnerable," says Mr Silvestri. He also worries about the increased frequency and intensity of droughts due to El Nino, and Lima's current reliance on just one 60-km (37-mile) tunnel fetching water from the other side of the Andes. And now there's glacial melt.

"We really are on the edge of an abyss," he warns.

Scientists say it is hard to predict in how many years the effect of glacial melt will really bite. But it is remarkable how many experts in Peru take seriously the prediction that the time will come this century when a barrel of water will cost more than a barrel of oil.

Peru's Mountain Glaciers Are Melting Away

Peru May Lose Glaciers By 2015

Melting Glaciers Threaten Peru

The pictures in this last link are from 2003, and here we sit still watching them melt in 2007 as we continue to spew millions of tons of GHGs into our atmosphere everyday while the water supplies becomes endangered.

They will either have to find a way to bring the water over or move the people. But then, if the water is not being replenished to keep up with the pace of its exhaustion as is the case now, does it matter what side of the wall they live on? And where will they get it from?

This is the common tale of so many poor countries in our world today left to deal with the ramifications of climate change that rich countries are exacerbatng and refusing to take repsonsibility for because they seek to make a profit from it.

Water Privitization In Peru

People literally have died for clean water because they couldn't afford to pay for it. And now with climate change making it even more precious, look to the World Bank and private corporations like Bechtel to be licking their chops.

Water Privitization/Latin America/Peru

Today Is World Water Day

World Water Day

Since being designated as such by the UN in 1993, every March 22nd is World Water Day. This year's theme is water scarcity as we now see over a billion people in this world without potable water to sustain their needs with predictions of over 2.8 billion being without water within the next twenty years. With an ever thirsty world putting pressure on this precious resource through population growth, mismanagement, waste (primarily through agriculture) and most alarmingly, climate change which is ravaging Australia, Asia, and Africa with droughts, fires, and erratic weather patterns that harm the economy and the environment and cause deaths among humans and other species, this is not a crisis we can turn away from any longer.

For me this is the most important environmental issue we now face for our future sustainability, as we all know we cannot survive without water and with it dwindling more each year we not only open ourselves up to shortages and scarcity, but famine and war. Water sustainability is not only an environmental issue, it is also an economic and social issue but more importantly it is a moral and human rights issue.

NO ONE on this planet should have to go without the water they need to feed and sustain their needs and the sad thing about all of this is, is that we have enough water to sustain all life but it is being wasted by greed, gluttony, mismanagement, corruption and pollution by our own hand besides the climate change humans are contributing to that has led us to more severe and persistent droughts in Asia, Africa, and Australia that have seen farmers committing suicide because they have lost everything because of it.

That is why I was also very grateful to Al Gore for mentioning this in his tesitmony in the Senate yesterday. He talked about the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China that no longer reach the sea. The Yangtze is now evaporating to the point that in some areas you can actually walk on the river bed and step in puddles where there used to be a river. Lake Chad, Lake Victoria, the Danube, and even right in this country with rivers such as the Columbia, the Moreau, and the Great Lakes have also all been victims to diversion, dams, population, and climate change.

The question now is, does the world care enough to truly face this and work for solutions?

The link above will lead to information about World Water Day and events you can join. However, If you can't join an event you can still show your concern and caring in addressing and solving this crisis through a gift to many organizations that support water sustainability. The best organization I know of and am a sustaining donor of is Water Partners International Their missions bring pumps and water to those in lands that would never have it otherwise. They bring life.

And that is really what this day is about. Warning people of the dangerous road we travel on by continuing to dismiss the importance of water in our lives and how we use it especially in light of the spectre of global warming, but also celebrating the life we can create through working to see that day come when every person in this world regardless of race, creed, class, or location can share equally in this gift of life that is THEIR RIGHT to have.

Water Day: Key Development Goals Stagnating

WATER DAY:Key Development Goals Stagnating

Mithre J. Sandrasagra
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 19 (IPS) - Halfway to 2015, the year when the globally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are supposed to be reached, the crisis in water and sanitation as well as in water resources management remains among the great human development and environmental challenges.

In the run-up to World Water Day on Thursday, the United Nations is stressing the importance of good governance and proper management of water resources at both the international and local levels. The focus of World Water Day 2007, "Coping with Water Scarcity," will require addressing a range of issues, from protection of the environment and global warming to equitable distribution of water for irrigation, industry and household use.

"The state of the world's waters remains fragile," stressed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Available supplies are under great duress as a result of high population growth, unsustainable consumption patterns, poor management practices, pollution, inadequate investment in infrastructure, and low efficiency in water-use." There is enough water in the world for everyone, but only if it is properly managed, according to the U.N.

Slightly more than a billion people do not have access to adequate clean water to meet their basic daily needs, and 2.6 billion do not have proper sanitation, according to the World Health Organisation and the U.N. children's agency UNICEF. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world's population could be living under water stress conditions. Those affected are already among the world's poorest, over half of them living in China and India, according to U.N. estimates.

More at the link
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The key to this is agriculture, and again, moral will. This is one of the most important issues socially and environmentally that we now face as a civilization. I sure wish it got the attention it deserves in this country.