China's Water Woes

In my opinion, it's just a matter of time.  Water wars are coming...

China's Growing Water Crisis

By Elizabeth Economy, World Politics Review

August 10, 2011

What is the biggest challenge that China faces?

Corruption, the gap between the rich and poor, and the rapidly aging population often top the list of answers to this question.

Yet a closer look suggests that the greatest threat may well be lack of access to clean water. From "cancer villages" to violent protests to rising food prices, diminishing water supplies are exerting a profound and harmful effect on the Chinese people as well as on the country's capacity to continue to prosper economically.

While much of the challenge remains within China, spillover effects - such as the rerouting of transnational rivers and a push to acquire arable land abroad - are also being felt well outside the country's borders.

China's leaders have acknowledged the severity of the challenge and have adopted a number of policies to address their growing crisis. However, their efforts have fallen woefully short, as they fail to include the fundamental reforms necessary to turn the situation around. Meanwhile domestic pressures, as well as international concerns, continue to mount.

Development Run Amok

China's water story begins with a challenging reality: The country's per capita water resources just exceeded more than one-quarter that of the world average, and the distribution of those resources throughout the country is highly uneven.

Northern China is home to approximately 40 percent of the country's total population and almost half its agricultural land, and produces more than 50 percent of GDP. But it receives only 12 percent of total precipitation. Southern China, in contrast, receives 80 percent of China's total precipitation, yet skyrocketing levels of water pollution dramatically reduce the south's natural advantage.

The spectacular economic growth that has made China the envy of the world has only exacerbated the challenge. Resources, particularly water, are consumed without consideration for future demand. Industry and agriculture are notoriously profligate water consumers: Industry, which accounts for about one-quarter of China's total water consumption, uses anywhere from four to 10 times more water per unit of GDP as other competitive economies.

Water used for energy is a singularly important drain on China's scarce resources. By far, the largest portion of China's industrial water use is devoted to energy: The process of mining, processing and consuming coal alone accounts for almost 20 percent of all water consumed nationally.

Hydropower raises the bar even further. Already the largest producer of hydropower in the world, China plans to triple hydropower capacity by 2020. According to Ma Jun, the director of the Chinese NGO Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, many Chinese rivers simply won't be running in 2020 if China meets its hydropower capacity goals.

Agriculture, which accounts for 62 percent of China's total water consumption, also takes a serious toll on China's water supply. Almost two-thirds of China's arable land lies in the perennially dry north, and irrigation practices in China continue to be inefficient, with less than half of the water used for irrigation actually reaching crops.


Even municipalities suffer from serious water wastage: About 20 percent of urban water consumption is lost through leaky pipes. China's goal of urbanizing 400 million people by 2030 means that the water challenge will likely only increase. Urban, middle class residents - with water-consuming appliances, homes with lawns to water and a fondness for golf courses - use 300 percent more water than their rural counterparts.

China's widespread pollution adds another dimension to the country's water crisis. More than 90 percent of southern China's water withdrawal comes from surface water, but in the first half of 2010, almost a quarter of China's surface water was so polluted that it was not even usable for industry, and less than half of the total supplies of water were found to be drinkable. For decades, factories and municipalities have dumped untreated waste directly into streams, rivers and coastal waters.

The Shifting Landscape

China's economic growth, inefficiencies and wastage in water usage are transforming the geography and resource base of the country. First, the sheer amount of available water is declining. During the period from 2000 to 2009, the amount of accessible water in China decreased by 13 percent. By 2030, the Ministry of Water Resources anticipates that per capita water resources will decline below the World Bank's scarcity levels. Northern China reports some of the highest rates of water loss in the world.

Moreover, according to China's Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei, two-thirds of Chinese cities face increased scarcity of water, and overall the country confronts a water shortage of 40 billion cubic meters annually. In rural China, 320 million people - one-quarter of China's total population - don't have access to safe drinking water.

Second, the country is sinking. The extensive contamination of surface water has forced the Chinese to increase their exploitation of groundwater, leading to groundwater depletion and a dramatic drop in the ground water tables: 100 to 300 meters in Beijing, and up to 90 meters in other parts of China.

In Beijing, land subsidence resulting from this groundwater depletion has destroyed factories, buildings and underground pipelines. Saltwater intrusion as well as pollution is further compromising the diminishing groundwater supplies: Of the 182 cities with monitored groundwater in 2010, more than half registered "poor" to "extremely poor" in water quality. Even China's Ministry of Environmental Protection was forced to acknowledge, "It is not easy to be optimistic about the quality" of the groundwater.

Finally, desertification is advancing. While the south is often faced with catastrophic floods, desertification of the north has become widespread: One Chinese official estimated that it would take 300 years to reverse the desertification of lands that has already taken place - the majority in areas bordering the North's Gobi Desert - due to overexploitation of environmental resources. Even as local officials fight to reverse the trend, the desert continues to expand at a rate of more than 1,060 square miles per year.

The Hidden Costs

What really concerns China's leaders, however, are the social, economic and political impacts of this growing scarcity. As China's Minister for the Environment Zhou Shengxian suggested on his agency's website, "The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation's economic and social development."

For the Chinese people, the failure of local officials and factory managers to enforce environmental regulations translates into serious public health concerns, crop loss, poisoned fish and livestock, and a lack of water to run factories. For Chinese officials, the failure to protect the environment and provide adequate and safe water to their people is one of the chief causes of social unrest in the country and perhaps their greatest policy concern.

Climate Change 4200 Years Ago

No one has yet answered why the weather patterns suddenly shifted - and stayed shifted for some 300 years!  Our scientists know that this happened, and our archaeologists have uncovered the resulting devastation.  Civilizations were destroyed.  People and animals starved to death when the rains were cut by as much as 50% in almost all areas of the globe.  In these days when a few years without rain can cost billions of dollars in crop losses, send the price of food sky high and kill hundreds of thousands (as in Somalia, for instance), what would we do if the rains were cut by 30 to 50% for 300 years?  What would happen to Africa?  China?  India?  The United States? 

From Science at msnbc.com
Ancient city survived as civilizations collapsed
Archaeologists involved in arduous excavation want to know, 'How did that happen?'
updated 7/29/2011 1:01:26 PM ET

As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.

Their next question is — why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned? [Oh please, people who were fleeing drought-destroyed fields, towns and city-states had to live somewhere where there was a reliable water supply!]

"There was widespread abandonment of many of the largest archaeological sites and ancient cities in the region and also large numbers of smaller sites," said Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. "At Tell Qarqur and probably at other sites also in the Orontes River Valley, where our site is located, (settlement) continues, and in our case, seems to have probably broadened (during that time)."

Casana and Boston University archaeologist Rudolph Dornemann discovered mud-brick homes beyond the city's fortification walls, suggesting the area was thriving.

"It seems like there is an intensively occupied core and fortified area, and more dispersed settlement surrounding it," said Casana. One of the team members, Amy Karoll, presented the research at the 76th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in April.

Digging up history
Tell Qarqur was occupied for about 10,000 years, between 8,500 B.C. and A.D. 1350. While excavations have taken place off and on for nearly three decades now, only a small portion of the city has been excavated so far. The long history of the site makes digging down to the 4,200-year-old remains difficult. To compensate, the team has used Ground Penetrating Radar to help map structures beneath the surface.

One of the most interesting excavated finds is a small temple or shrine made out of stone that also dates back 4,200 years. "It's a small stone building with a whole series of plastered basins inside the building that were used probably in some kind of libation ritual," said Casana.

The team also found large standing stones, bones from baby sheep, cult stands used for incense and decorative figurines, some of which are now on display in a local museum.

Global climate change
Environmental data gathered from numerous sources, including ocean sediment cores and plant remains, suggests that there was a climate event that rocked the Middle East and much of the planet 4,200 years ago.

"At 4,200 years ago, there was an abrupt climate change, and abrupt drying, and abrupt deflection of the Mediterranean westerly winds that transport humid air into the eastern Mediterranean region," Harvey Weiss of Yale University told LiveScience.

Weiss has been researching the phenomenon, working with other scholars to figure out how broad an event this was and what its effects were.

"That deflection of those winds reduced the annual precipitation across western Asia for about 300 years," he said, with rainfall being reduced somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent. This meant that cities in the Middle East that depended on rain-fed crops had a difficult time surviving. The intense drought extended nearly globally, Weiss noted.

Along with the Mesopotamian and eastern Mediterranean societies that met their demise, Old Kingdom Egypt, a civilization that built the Great Pyramids, collapsed. "A different weather system reduced the flow of the Nile River at the same period so the Nile was affected," Weiss said.

Casana cautioned that not all scholars are convinced that climate change was the main cause for the collapse of cities in the Middle East. [Really?]

"It's a pretty thorny question," Casana said.

Some researchers "simply don't like the sort of one-to-one causal story that that kind of narrative tells, in which the rain stopped falling and everybody died," he said, adding that the way people were farming and using the land may also have played an important role. [But not enough of a role to shift global rainfall patterns!  Come on!]

Another factor is the shaky political stability that large states sometimes endure. "There are other scholars who simply think that the decline of these civilizations, at that time, is kind of part and parcel of the story of civilization itself," Casana said. [Well of course political instability of already shaky regimes would have resulted when people were starving to death!]

Why did Tell Qarqur survive?
The question now is why Tell Qarqur is different. Why did the site survive and expand while so many others collapsed? Casana said that until more excavation is done, the jury will still be out as to why.
Weiss believes that the Orontes River, on which the city is located, is the key to answering this question. He pointed out that other archaeological sites on the river, including Qatna and Nasriyah, also appear to have prospered during this time of collapse.

"The Orontes River is fed by a huge underground chamber of water, which is called a Karst," Weiss said. "That huge underground source of water continued to flow and to feed the Orontes River during this period when rainfall was diminished."

There are other questions. Before the collapse hit, Tell Qarqur was within the sphere of influence of a powerful kingdom known as Ebla. That kingdom was destroyed sometime prior to 4,200 years ago. This likely changed the way the city was governed and managed, something that future excavations may reveal.

"What happens to the political realities of the community at Qarqur I don't know," said Casana. "I'm sure there must have been some change."

Weiss said that the discovery of cities that grew during climate collapse offers a new frontier for archaeologists and scientists to investigate.

"I think that the early bronze four (the scientific name for this period of collapse) culture of the Orontes is only just now emerging for our attention and that it's going to provide an extremely interesting example of cultural growth in unique environments during this period," he said.

****************************************************************

Dudes, start looking for other areas where it is known that such Karsts, and other "guaranteed" sources of fresh water, existed 4,200 years ago. 

Friday Night Miscellany

Ahhhh, it was a beautiful day here today, and I loved having the day off! I got a lot done, but not nearly what I had planned :) Instead, after I finished cutting the front lawn, I did some blogging, ate lunch, and then had a nice long nap. There's nothing like a nice long nap in the early afternoon to make one feel truly rich and at leisure! Here's an article that caught my eye at The New York Times: Los Angeles Eyes Sewage as a Source of Water. Rather behind the times, I think; Chicago has, from the beginning of time, been dumping it's allegedly treated waste water into the Chicago River that was specifically engineered to flow the wrong way and force its waste into rivers that eventually flow to the mighty Mississippi, from which millions draw their drinking water; and in Milwaukee we've been dumping our actually treated waste water into Lake Michigan for about 100 years. After the 1993 mass outbreak of cryptosporidium (blamed on run-off from animal waste, yeah, right) that sickened some 400,000 people, the city spent millions upgrading this and that at the waste water treatment center which now includes something with ozone to kill all the crap (no pun intended) that the prior treatment system did not. Nothing like scientific progress, heh? What's worse - dying from sewerage passed off as drinking water after being "filtered" or dying from the toxins in the plastic bottles that contain supposedly "pure" drinking water? Pick your poison. There's something wrong with this picture, folks. This article says that "man" started populating the rest of the world about 60,000 years ago out of Africa. This article says there is evidence of human habitation in the United States from about 50,000 years ago. If both are true, this means that man would have had to hightail it out of Africa all the way across Europe and then swim over to the east coast of North America, or else trek to the eastern edge of Siberia and then swim over what used to be the Bering land bridge into Alaska, because 10,000 years ago the glaciers were melting and the traditional "stepping off" places that science says existed in order to aid the travel of man from the "old world" to the "new world" would have been under lots of water, darlings. So, both cannot be true! Under traditional theory, I believe it's still being taught that man first arrived in Alaska some 14,000 years ago, and made it all the way down to South American by 13,000 years ago, and all the latest evidence is routinely ignored, dismissed or - if mentioned at all - ridiculed. Geez, will the academics ever get it right? Here's a squirrel story that is just so cute - and the ranger ain't bad, either: A squirrel's gone nuts over ranger Mark. A "Don't Eat That Elmer" story: "Snake man" slithers out of prison cell Spooky video - call me skeptical. 'night!