Thursday, April 12, 2007

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.

Monday, April 09, 2007

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.

Another World Water Day Gone

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