Water Wars: Coming to a Country Near You (Or Maybe Your Country)

China: As water demands grow sharply, supply is shrinking

China has 20 percent of the world's population, and 7 percent of its fresh water. As pressure mounts, officials are pushing conservation reforms such as reforestation and water taxes – and diverting water from the south to the north.

By Michael Holtz 1 hour ago

A 15-foot band of eroded red clay that surrounds Miyun Reservoir, one of Beijing’s largest sources of fresh water, serves as a stark reminder of the region’s severe water shortage.

Built 100 miles northeast of the capital in the 1960s, the reservoir has operated at less than a third of its capacity for years. A massive project now under way to divert water to Beijing from southern China will help alleviate demand, but protecting the reservoir from pollution remains a separate challenge.

China has 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its fresh water – and it is quickly running out of the vital fluid.

Efforts to boost supply have provided temporary relief for major cities, but the central government is scrambling to preserve what water is left. Expanded conservation work, higher water prices, and new industrial regulations are on the table.

 

“The demand is growing but the supply is shrinking,” says Zhang Yan, program coordinator of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global environmental organization in Beijing. “There is just less and less water.”

 

Environmentalists and local authorities have promoted forest restoration as a key tool for conserving water. Trees and shrubs now cover upward of 70 percent of the Miyun watershed, a dramatic uptick from a half century ago, when forests covered less than 10 percent of the region. The plants help stave off erosion and improve the reservoir’s water quality by filtering out pesticides, fertilizers, and other toxic chemicals.

 

China Pursuing Water Security? Good luck with that, dudes!

AFP feed to Yahoo News, April 18, 2015:

China's struggle for water security

By Giles Hewitt

Way back in 1999, before he became China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao warned that water scarcity posed one of the greatest threats to the "survival of the nation".

Sixteen years later, that threat looms ever larger, casting a forbidding shadow over China's energy and food security and demanding urgent solutions with significant regional, and even global, consequences.

The mounting pressure on China's scarce, unequally distributed and often highly polluted water supply was highlighted in a report released at the World Water Forum this week in Daegu, South Korea.

Published by the Hong Kong-based NGO, China Water Risk (CWR), it underlined the complexity of the challenge facing China as it seeks to juggle inextricably linked and often competing concerns over water, energy supply and climate change.

"There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to China's water-energy-climate nexus," the report said.

"More importantly, China's energy choices do not only impact global climate change, but affect water availability for Asia," it said, warning of the danger of future "water wars" given China's upstream control over Asia's mightiest rivers.

The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau is essentially the world's largest water tank and the origin of some of Asia's most extensive river systems including the Indus, Brahmaputra and Mekong. The most significant link in the nexus the report describes is the fact that 93 percent of China's power generation is water-reliant.

"Chinese officials are starting to say water security comes first," the report's author Debra Tan told AFP in Daegu. "Because without it, there is no energy security and, of course, no food security."Agriculture accounts for between 65 and 70 percent of China's water use and vast amounts are wasted by inefficient irrigation.

Water, water everywhere...

Except in Texas; except in Nevada; except in India; except in China, particularly in the arid north; except in India; too much in Bangladesh, but most of it not fit for consumption; except in Atlanta; except in the Ogalla Basin; except in Australia; except in eastern Africa; etc. etc. etc.
People can and do deny it's happening.  I don't care what you call it - global warming, climate change, whatever.  The fact is, we're shortly to turn the clock on 7 billion people, most of them in countries that can ill afford to support the additional population!  What the hell are we supposed to do?  Just let them all die from preventable DIRTY water-born diseases?  Are we supposed to just turn our backs on providing technology at low or even no cost to countries that need it that can turn salt water into potable water?  Are we supposed to let people just die of thirst, reasoning according to the marketplace "oh well, tough titty, them's the breaks kiddo, too bad you were born poor."  Aren't we already saying that to too many of of our children?

Why the World May Be Running Out of Clean Water
By BRYAN WALSH | Time.com – 16 hrs ago

Earlier this month, officials in the South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu had to confront a pretty dire problem: they were running out of water. Due to a severe and lasting drought, water reserves in this country of 11,000 people had dwindled to just a few days' worth. Climate change plays a role here: as sea levels rose, Tuvalu's groundwater became increasingly saline and undrinkable, leaving the island dependent on rainwater. But now a La Niña–influenced drought has severely curtailed rainfall, leaving Tuvalu dry as a bone. "This situation is bad," Pusinelli Laafai, Tuvalu's permanent secretary of home affairs, told the Associated Press earlier this month. "It's really bad."

So far Tuvalu has been bailed out by its neighbors Australia and New Zealand, which have donated rehydration packets and desalination equipment. But the archipelago's water woes are just beginning — and it's far from the only part of the world facing a big dry. Other island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati will see their groundwater spoil as sea levels rise. Texas, along with much of the American Southwest, is in the grip of a truly record-breaking drought — even after days of storms in the past month, Houston's total 2011 rainfall is still short of its yearly average by a whopping 2 ft., or 60 cm. Australia has experienced severely dry weather for so long, it's not even clear whether the country is in a state of drought, or more worryingly, a new and permanent dry climate that could forever alter life Down Under. "Climate-change impacts on water resources continue to appear in the form of growing influence on the severity and intensity of extreme events," says Peter Gleick, one of the foremost water experts in the U.S. and head of the Pacific Institute, an NGO based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues. "Australia's recent extraordinary extreme drought should be an eye-opener for the rest of us." (See photos of the world's water crisis.)

Volume 7 of the Pacific Institute's regular report on global water usage, The World's Water, comes out today, just in time to address the squeeze of droughts, the increasingly apparent impact of climate change and the threats facing our relatively scarce supplies of freshwater. The sweeping report is a reminder that clean water is vital to life — as Gleick points out, more than 2 million people die each year from preventable water-related diseases — and that on the whole, we're not doing a very good job of husbanding that resource. There's even a risk here that parts of the U.S., especially the arid West, may have passed "peak water" — the point at which it becomes essentially impossible to increase supply.

Potential water shortages are one more reason to try to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the worst impacts of climate change — a warmer world is likely to further dry out already arid regions, even as extreme rainfall intensifies in already wet areas. But however severe the effects of climate change become, we're going to need to use water much more efficiently than we do now: the world's population is expected to pass the 7 billion mark by the end of this month, and more people will need more water. "New thinking about solutions and sustainable water planning and management, better data, case studies and efforts to raise awareness, are all needed," Gleick writes in The World's Water

Smarter water policy might mean rethinking other fields of resource use. Take, for example, natural gas drilling. Hydraulic fracturing has vastly increased American supplies of natural gas, which is good for gas companies and, because natural gas generally has a greener footprint, potentially good for the environment as well. But fracking requires a significant amount of water — up to 5 million gal. (19 million L) per well. That might not be a major problem in a relatively wet state like Pennsylvania, but in bone-dry states like Texas, water-intensive fracking has sparked a backlash. There's also the uncertain risk of water contamination from fracking and drilling, and the problem of water waste. "The rapid expansion of the use of hydraulic fracturing to increase natural gas production has serious potential consequences for local water resources," says Gleick. It's important that "more effort be put into both understanding the real risks and protecting water resources before pushing for accelerated programs of natural gas production."

What we need most of all is a rethink of how we deal with water and a recognition of just how valuable it is — especially in a warming world. That means focusing on modulating demand as much as increasing supply. Through most of the 20th century, governments dealt with water problems through massive construction projects designed to expand and regulate supply — think the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas or the Three Gorges Dam in China.

But the era of those big projects may be ending, largely because we've begun to recognize the environmental problems that come with major dams, including the loss of aquatic wildlife and the displacement of local populations. Last month Burma's military government — not ordinarily responsive to public opinion — canceled a planned $3.6 billion Chinese-backed hydroelectric dam that would have displaced thousands of villagers. Just as we've recognized that energy efficiency is often the fastest and cheapest way to address carbon emissions, there's much that can be done to curb water waste. We need to "adopt 21st century strategies of new forms of sustainable water supply, rethink water demand and efficiency of use, and [embrace] smart use of pricing and economics," says Gleick. The alternative could mean ending up like poor Tuvalu — high and dry.

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.

Water Crisis in China Spurs Big Plans

It seems there is no such thing as benefit/cost analysis and environmental impact studies in Communist China.  Their excessive population and disregard for the environment will bring China down.  I foresee China begging water plus nations like Canada and the US to export water to them...  I'm sure I'll see it within what is left of my lifetime.  I sincerely hope the "free marketers" will not be in control of either country when it starts - and ends.

By EDWARD WONG
Published: June 1, 2011
New York Times

Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern

DANJIANGKOU, China — North China is dying.

A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.

Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.

The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.

Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.

“Look at this dead yellow earth,” said Li Jiaying, 67, a hunched woman hobbling to her new concrete home clutching a sickle and a bundle of dry sticks for firewood. “Our old home wasn’t even being flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No one wanted to leave.”

About 150,000 people had been resettled by this spring. Many more will follow. A recent front-page article in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said the project “has entered a key period of construction.”

Some Chinese scientists say the diversion could destroy the ecology of the southern rivers, making them as useless as the Yellow River. The government has neglected to do proper impact studies, they say. There are precedents in the United States. Lakes in California were damaged and destroyed when the Owens River was diverted in the early 20th century to build Los Angeles.

Here, more than 14 million people in Hubei would be affected if the project damaged the Han River, the tributary of the Yangtze where the middle route starts, said Du Yun, a geographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the provincial capital.

Officials in provinces south of Beijing and Tianjin have privately raised objections and are haggling over water pricing and compensation; midlevel officials in water-scarce Hebei Province are frustrated that four reservoirs in their region have sent more than 775 million cubic meters, or 205 billion gallons, of water to Beijing since September 2008 in an “emergency” supplement to the middle route.

Overseers of the eastern route, which is being built alongside an ancient waterway for barges called the Grand Canal, have found that the drinking water to be brought to Tianjin from the Yangtze is so polluted that 426 sewage treatment plants have to be built; water pollution control on the route takes up 44 percent of the $5 billion investment, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. The source water from the Han River on the middle route is cleaner. But the main channel will cross 205 rivers and streams in the industrial heartland of China before reaching Beijing.

“When water comes to Beijing, there’s the danger of the water not being safe to drink,” said Dai Qing, an environmental advocate who has written critically about the Three Gorges Dam.

“I think this project is a product of the totalitarian regime in Beijing as it seeks to take away the resources of others,” she added. “I am totally opposed to this project.”

Ms. Dai and some Chinese scholars say the government should instead be limiting the population in the northern cities and encouraging water conservation.

The project’s official Web site says that the diversion “will be an important and basic facility for mitigating the existing crisis of water resources in north China” and that sufficient studies have been done. Wang Jian, a former environmental and water management official with the Beijing government and the State Council, China’s cabinet, agreed that the project “carries huge risks,” but he said there were no other options given the severity of the current water shortage.

The middle route is to start major operations in 2014, and the eastern route is expected to be operational by 2013. The lines were originally supposed to open by the 2008 Summer Olympics, but have been hobbled by myriad problems.

The diversion project was first studied in the 1950s, after Mao uttered: “Water in the south is abundant, water in the north scarce. If possible, it would be fine to borrow a little.”

In a country afflicted by severe cycles of droughts and floods and peasant rebellions that often resulted from them, control of water has always been important to Chinese rulers. Emperors sought to legitimize their rule with large-scale water projects like the Grand Canal or the irrigation system in Dujiangyan.

After the initial studies in the 1950s, the government did not look seriously again at the project until the 1990s, when north China was hit hard by droughts. In 2002, the State Council gave the green light for work to start on the middle and eastern routes; the western route, which would run at an average altitude of 10,000 to 13,000 feet across the Tibetan plateau to help irrigate the Yellow River basin, has been deemed too difficult to start for now.

Officials in Tianjin are so skeptical of the eastern route’s ability to deliver drinkable water that they are looking at desalinization as an alternative. Planners have more hope for the middle route, though the engineering is a much greater challenge — the canal has to be built entirely from scratch, with 1,774 structures constructed along its length to channel the water, since there is no pre-existing waterway like the Grand Canal to follow.

At the start of the route, the water level of the Danjiangkou Reservoir on the Han River has been raised 43 feet to 558 feet so that the water can flow downhill to Beijing. The government said the rising waters and a need to combat soil erosion necessitated moving 130,000 farmers last year from around the reservoir. Similar relocations are taking place all along the main channel, which runs through four provinces.

About 1,300 residents of Qingshan township have been moved to Xiangbei Farm, desolate land where a prison once stood. The villagers now live in sterile rows of yellow concrete houses 125 miles east of their abandoned ancestral homes. A government sign in the middle of the settlement says: “The land is fertile and has complete irrigation systems.”

The farmers know better. Each person is supposed to get a small plot of land free, but the soil here is well known to be exceedingly poor. The people also complain that in the government’s compensation formula, their old homes were undervalued, so many have had to pay several thousand dollars to buy new homes.

“There’s nothing here,” said Huang Jiuguo, 57. “There’s no enterprise. Our children are grown, and they need something to do.”

For three days last November, thousands of residents of a resettlement area in Qianjiang city blocked roads to protest poorly built homes and lack of promised compensation, according to a report by Radio Free Asia. Officials ordered the police to break up the rally, resulting in clashes, injuries and arrests.

Forced relocations, though, could pale next to larger fallouts from the project.

“We feel that we are still unsure how the project is going to impact on the environment, ecologies, economies and society at large,” said Mr. Du, the geographer in Wuhan, who carefully added he was not outright opposed to the project.

The central question for people in Hubei is whether the Han River, crucial to farming and industrial production hubs, will be killed to keep north China alive.

In a paper published in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mr. Du and two co-authors estimated that the diversion project would reduce the flow of the middle and lower stretches of the Han significantly, “leading to an uphill situation for the prevention of water pollution and ecological protection.” Though the study first appeared in 2006, the government has not altered its original plan, Mr. Du said.

Central planners decided on the amount of water to be diverted based on calculations of water flow in the Han done from the 1950s to the early 1990s; since then, the water flow has dropped, partly because of prolonged droughts, but planners have made no adjustments, Mr. Du said. The amount to be diverted is more than one-third of the annual water flow. “That will exert a huge damaging impact on the river,” he said.

The Han River is already facing enormous challenges — industries are discharging more and more pollutants, companies are dredging sand to feed construction needs in nearby cities and algal bloom has hit the river hard. The diversion of water to Beijing will add to the pressures. “If the water quality cannot be ameliorated effectively, the aquatic life populations will be further decimated,” Mr. Du and his co-authors wrote.

The diversion from the Han is necessitating more complex projects to raise water levels. One side diversion brings water from the Yangtze to the Han. Another would bring water from the Three Gorges reservoir to the Danjiangkou reservoir.

Government officials in the south are keenly aware of the changes coming to the Han. In Xiangfan, officials have shuttered some small factories like paper producers and forced others to use more nonpolluting materials, said Yun Jianli, director of the environmental advocacy group Green Han River. “The local government is very concerned about the river and impact of the diversion project,” she said.

The political conflicts are obvious. Mr. Du, a member of the provincial consultative legislature, said officials in Hubei had been in constant negotiations with officials in Beijing for compensation. In the 1990s, the central government proposed a package of water projects valued at $50 million at the time to help Hubei. After rounds of negotiations, the current proposal for supplemental water projects is estimated at more than $1 billion.

The demands of the north will not abate. Migration from rural areas means Beijing’s population is growing by one million every two years, according to an essay in China Daily written last October by Hou Dongmin, a scholar of population development at Renmin University of China. “With its dwindling water resources, Beijing cannot sustain a larger population,” Mr. Hou said. “Instead, it should make serious efforts to control the population, if not reduce it.”

Beijing has about 100 cubic meters, or 26,000 gallons, of water available per person. According to a standard adopted by the United Nations, that is a fraction of the 1,000 cubic meters, or 260,000 gallons, per person that indicates chronic water scarcity.

The planning for Beijing’s growth up to 2020 by the State Council already assumes the water diversion will work, rather than planning for growth with much less water, said Mr. Wang, the former official.

City planners see a Beijing full of golf courses, swimming pools and nearby ski slopes — the model set by the West. [Ohmhygoddess!]

“Instead of transferring water to meet the growing demand of a city, we should decide the size of a city according to how much water resources it has,” Mr. Wang said. “People’s desire for development has no end.”

Li Bibo, Jonathan Kaiman and Jimmy Wang contributed research from Beijing.

Water - water everywhere...nor any drop to drink...

Oh goddess!  How well I remember those words from a poem I studied - get ready for this - in HIGH SCHOOL.  Darlings!  I graduated in 1969.  Oy.  It's from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and one of the reasons it is still studied today is because of that haunting refrain.

Once again, so, I was reminded of that powerful language when I read this article a few days ago in The Wall Street Journal.  Everyone should read WSJ - it give you insight into what the enemy is thinking.

At least three years ago the investment club of which I am a part took heed of the continuing droughts and horrid water pollution in China and India, and we invested accordingly.  Our investments are paying a modest return at present - but in the next 10, 20, 30 years...well, we hope to cash out of the club very very rich...

Want to Reign Supreme? Control the Water
From ancient Egypt to imperial China, those who could best manage great rivers have ruled.
April 30, 2011
By STEVEN SOLOMON

It is a testament to the power of rivers that Yu the Great, the founding hero of ancient China's Yellow River civilization, was a water engineer. In the 23rd century B.C., as the legend goes, he tamed the deadly floods that gave the river the nickname "China's sorrow" by diverting its muddy waters into irrigation channels for nourishing fields of millet and wheat.

Confucius later extolled Yu as an exemplar for China's elite governing technocrats. To this day, river management and governance are so closely correlated in China that the character for "politics" is derived from roots meaning "flood control." [See note below.]

Only a minuscule six-thousandths of 1% of the world's freshwater runs through rivers, and societies everywhere must use this scarce resource for everything from drinking and bathing to irrigation and producing energy. Effective water management offers the prospect of life and prosperity, but water's more extreme manifestations are great destroyers, in the form of floods, storms and droughts. Managing this uneasy life-and-death relationship has been a priority for every civilization.

Since ancient times, rivers have been seen as the link between the temporal world and the eternal cycles of death, fertility and rebirth. In the Bible, the Garden of Eden gives rise to four great rivers. Purification of the deceased in the holy Ganges is paralleled by the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Mesopotamia's flood story centered on a single, forewarned family that survived by building an ark (possibly inspired by an actual flood that submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak in 3100 B.C.) and is strikingly similar to the later stories of Noah and Hindu mythology.

Political leadership has often been grounded in water's mystical authority. Sargon, who usurped power in Akkadia in 2334 B.C., was said to have been an abandoned baby, drawn from the river, who grew up to lead his people—a tale recounted about Moses and ancient Rome's founding twins, Romulus and Remus. Chinese emperors ruled through a "mandate from Heaven" that was validated in part by sufficient rain and successful waterworks. The Babylonian King Hammurabi proclaimed himself the divine "provider of abundant waters" who "heaps the granaries full of grain." He worked hard to make good on this claim, overseeing irrigation projects and incorporating water management into the laws of his famous code.

In modern times, we have Franklin Roosevelt's dedication in 1935 of the giant Hoover Dam, which transformed America's arid Southwest by providing irrigation, flood control and electricity. Prime Minister Nehru called the massive Bhakra Dam "the new temple of resurgent India," and Egypt's Gamal Nasser compared the Aswan Dam to a modern pyramid. Globally, some 45,000 large dams have been built (half of them in China), and they have been linchpins of the Green Revolution in agriculture, allowing much of the world to be fed reliably for the first time.



Egypt and the Nile, late 19th century CE, before the Aswan Dam
Imagine 6000 years of this...

The Aswan Dam transformed the Nile beyond pharaonic imagining. Until Aswan, the long but shallow Nile stood apart among great rivers as the only natural irrigation system in world history. Its regular annual floods came and went in miraculous synchronization with the planting and harvesting seasons, flushed out poisonous salts that afflict artificial irrigation, and left behind fresh silt that rendered man-made fertilizers unnecessary.

Pharaohs reigned with supreme authoritarian power on the strength of the food surpluses generated with the assistance of their priestly water managers, who knew the esoteric secrets of the river and mobilized crews of forced peasant labor. But there was one key factor that the pharaohs could not control: the size of the Nile floods. To an astonishing degree, robust flows corresponded to food surpluses and periods of political unity; low flood periods to famine and dynastic collapse.

For 5,000 years, until the arrival of modern irrigation in the 19th century, the population of Egypt oscillated between 2.5 million and 5 million, depending on the size of the Nile floods. With the building of the Aswan Dam, its population reached 80 million—and is still soaring.

But the Nile also became a glorified irrigation ditch, dependent on artificial fertilizer and drainage like so many other river systems. Today, it is among the 70 major rivers—including the Yellow, Indus, Euphrates and Colorado—that is so heavily tapped that its flow barely trickles to the sea.

Two giant river systems that so far have defied human control are the Ganges-Brahmaputra and the Amazon (with two times and 10 times the flow of the Mississippi, respectively). Some half a billion of the world's poorest people depend on the waters of the Ganges, but the river has little storage capacity for resisting the ravages of extreme monsoon seasons. Moreover, the holy river is perilously polluted with human and man-made waste.

Until the 1970s, the supergiant Amazon, which alone accounts for one-fifth of the world's river runoff to the oceans, was scarcely developed by the nations through which it runs. As a result, it is still home to 60% of the world's remaining rain forests and remains the planet's largest store of biodiversity.

Today, however, logging, mining, ranching and the aggressive building of hydroelectric dams by Brazil are transforming the Amazon, sometimes for the worse. And so continues the quest to harness the most indispensable of the planet's resources.

—Mr. Solomon is the author of "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization."

Note:

Dr. David Lee in his "The Genealogy of Chess," directly tied the control of water and disastrous flooding to the creation of the ancient board games of Go and the later game of Xiang Qi, which features the Celestial River a/k/a the Milky Way, as a divider between two opposing forces and became popular just before the Han Dynasty and through it's reign (c. 220 BCE - 220 CE). 

In the earliest days, attempts to control the ravaging floods and the incredible water shortages that occurred during droughts even way back then were part divination, part engineering, part feng shui, part pure magic, and a lot of actual science! 

Four Devastating Asian Droughts Captured in Tree Rings

Study details at least four epic droughts in Asia
Thursday, April 22 07:42 pm
(This story from the UK version of Yahoo News from AP)
Jean-Louis Santini

Data collected over the past 15 years for the study is expected to help scientists understand how climate change can unleash large-scale weather disruptions.

Any drastic shifts to the seasonal monsoon rains in Asia, which feed nearly half the world's population by helping crops grow, could have serious socio-economic consequences, according to scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

They mapped out past droughts and their relative severity by sampling the wood of thousands of ancient trees across Asia. Among them was a drought that caused tens of millions of people to starve to death in the late 1870s.

"Global climate models fail to accurately simulate the Asian monsoon, and these limitations have hampered our ability to plan for future, potentially rapid and heretofore unexpected shifts in a warming world," said lead author Edward Cook, head of Lamont's Tree Ring Lab.

Prior to the study, published in Friday's edition of Science, reliable instrumental data collected in Asia -- such as temperature, rain accumulations and winds -- only dated back to 1950.

The scientists pointed to some evidence that monsoon changes are driven at least in part by variations in sea-surface temperatures, with some speculation but no certainty that warming global temperatures could modify and possibly intensify these cycles.

The tree-ring records suggested that climate may have played an important roll in the fall of China's Ming dynasty in 1644, by providing additional evidence of a severe drought already referenced in some historical Chinese texts as the worst in five centuries at the time.

According to the study, the drought occurred at some point between 1638 and 1641, most severely in northeastern China close to Beijing. It is believed to have helped fuel rebellions by farmers that eventually contributed to the Ming dynasty's fall.

Southern China is currently experiencing its worst drought in nearly a century. [I think it's a good guess that this drought - and fear - are primary driving forces behind the construction of an unprecedented number of gigantic dam projects that are disrupting the lives of millions of Chinese; the government probably figures it can deal with grumbling dispossessed farmers who, after all, have more or less sufficient food to survive - so what if they've been kicked off the land their families have farmed for the past thousand years; the government would not be able to long survive 300 million rioting starving farmers or - even more frightening, the starving residents of the cities.]

Rainfall determines the width of the annual growth rings of some tree species. The researchers' trek across Asia to find trees old enough for long-term records took them to over 300 sites, to Siberia, Indonesia, northern Australia, Pakistan and as far east as Japan.

"It's everything from lowland rainforests to high in the Himalayas," said study coauthor Kevin Anchukaitis, a Lamont tree ring scientist.

"You have a tremendous diversity of environment, climate influences and species."

University of Hawaii meteorologist Bin Wang said the tree-ring atlas is valuable to monsoon forecasters, allowing them to detect short-term and long-term patterns thanks to the detailed spatial areas and the length of the record.

Cleaning the Sacred Ganges River

One billion plus people living in India, the vast majority of whom are Hindu, want to float their bodies (cremated or otherwise) away down the sacred river upon leaving this earthly coil. So what do you think happens with all of those bodies and other, er, remains? That doesn't include local-point pollution and raw sewerage being dumped into the sacred river by the millions of tons each day, probably. Why would ANYONE want to bathe in the sacred Ganges, let alone drink its waters? Frankly, I'm surprised the estimated price tag is that cheap! Story at Telegraph.co.uk: India plans £2bn clean-up of the Ganges India's most sacred and polluted river is to be cleaned up with a £2 billion plan to divert thousands of tonnes of human ashes, dead bodies and waste into sewage plants. By Dean Nelson in New Delhi Published: 6:08PM BST 06 Oct 2009 The news will be a breath of fresh air to India's 830 million Hindus, each of whom must bathe in holy waters of the Ganges at least once in their lifetime. According to Hindu scripture, the river was created from the hair of the god Shiva to purify the earth and wash away its sins. Today the government is banking on new sewerage treatment plants to purify the "cleansing river" which is slowly dying under the weight of billions of litres of excrement, chemical waste, ashes and the bloated bodies of dead humans and animals. The stench from the treacle-like Ganges – or Ganga – has become a talking point among tourists who visit the holy city of Varanasi to marvel at the devotion of Hindus who drink its black water. It is a source of embarrassment to ministers who would like to see one of the country's greatest attractions returned to its former glory. Environment minister Jairam Ramesh unveiled "Mission Clean Ganga" to create new water treatment plants, reduce human and chemical pollution and bring sewage levels down towards bathing standard by 2020. The government has applied for a £1.5 billion World Bank loan to finance the project but has pledged central and state government funding to underwrite the work. Treatment plants in northern Indian cities which line the Ganges, like Kanpur, Lucknow and Allahabad, currently have the capacity to clean 220 million gallons per day of the 660 million gallons of sewage per day the towns flush into the river. However, experts said they do not believe the plan will succeed because it does not include the funds needed to move the sewage to the new treatment plants, or pay for the 24-hour electricity supply they need. RK Srinivasan, of the Delhi-based Centre for Environment and Science, said similar action plans had wasted hundreds of millions of pounds on failed projects to revive the Ganges' tributary, the Yamuna River. He said while Delhi has 30 sewerage plants, only half the city is served by sewerage pipes, and 50 per cent of the city's raw sewage flows straight into the river. For the Ganges, only 15 per cent of sewerage is treated before flowing into the river. Unpaid electricity bills mean many treatment plants sit idle, he said, while the sewage content of the rivers is concentrated because fresh water further upstream is diverted into the cities for drinking. "People defecate in the river because although there are toilets – 85 per cent in cities and 26 per cent in rural areas have access to toilets – they are not in use because there is no maintenance and there is a lack of water," he said. "The government should focus on managing the water, let fresh water flow in the river. Then the Ganga's sewage would be diluted," he said. [Yeah, right - and all those people upriver, what are they supposed to use for drinking water instead?] No pun intended - what a big stinking mess. It's not a joke. We can't live without potable water, PERIOD.

Gee, More Good News (Not)

What will happen first? Will my water stocks and my fertilizer stocks rebound off their current lows since the Crash of 2008 or will I be killed by a mad, ravaging mob bent on destroying anything and everything just for the hell of it? If this is the future, I don't want to play anymore... Oy - talk about irony - this story is from the Irish Times . com: Thursday, March 19, 2009 Scarce food, water, energy will bring global mayhem by 2030, says scientist IAN SAMPLE A “PERFECT STORM” of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee the worst-affected regions, the British government’s chief scientist will warn at a conference today. World upheavals will come to a head in 2030, Prof John Beddington will tell environmental groups and politicians at the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. The growing population and success in alleviating poverty in developing countries will trigger a surge in demand for food, water and energy over the next two decades, at a time when governments must also make major progress in combating climate change. “We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because all of these things are operating on the same timeframe,” said Prof Beddington. “If we don’t address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food and water shortages.” [Not to mention mass migration as coastal areas slowly fall to salt-water poisoning and sink, inch by inch, below the encroaching oceans due to global warming which cannot now be reversed no matter what we do.] Food prices for staple crops such as wheat and maize have recently settled after a sharp rise last year, when production failed to keep up with demand. But, according to Prof Beddington, global food reserves are so low – at 14 per cent of annual consumption – a long drought or big flood could see prices rapidly escalate again. Most of the food reserve is grain in transit, he said. “Our food reserves are at a 50-year low but, by 2030, we need to be producing 50 per cent more food. At the same time, we will need 50 per cent more energy and 30 per cent more fresh water. There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected. You can’t think about dealing with one without considering the others.” Before taking over from Sir David King as chief scientist last year, Prof Beddington was professor of applied population biology at Imperial College London. He is an expert on the sustainable use of renewable resources. In Britain, a global food shortage would drive up import costs and make food more expensive. Some parts of the country are predicted to become less able to grow crops as higher temperatures become the norm. Most climate models suggest the south-east of England will be especially vulnerable to water shortages, particularly in the summer. Prof Beddington’s speech will add to pressure on governments after last week’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, where scientists warned that the impact of global warming has been substantially underestimated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The latest research suggests that sea level rises, glacier melting and the risk of forest fires are at, or beyond, what was considered the worst-case scenario in 2007. Prof Beddington will say shifts in climate will see northern Europe and other high-latitude regions become key centres for food production. A technological push is needed to develop renewable energy supplies, boost crop yields and better utilise existing water supplies. Prof Beddington will use the speech to urge Europe to involve independent scientists more directly in its policymaking, using recent appointments by Barack Obama in the US as an example of how senior scientists have been brought into the political fold. Shortly after taking office, the president announced what many see as a “dream team” of scientists, including two Nobel laureates, to advise on science, energy and the environment. – (Guardian service) So - guess I won't be retiring to Las Vegas after all, I'll stick here next to Lake Michigan and farm my backyard -- after I install automated machine gun towers. By 2030 it may be a balmy 80 degrees just about year round here...

Drought Caused Collapse of Chinese Dynasties

What happened before happened many times, and is happening now... Ancient China: Lack Of Rainfall Could Have Contributed To Social Upheaval And Fall Of Dynasties ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2008) — Chinese history is replete with the rise and fall of dynasties, but researchers now have identified a natural phenomenon that may have been the last straw for some of them: a weakening of the summer Asian Monsoons. Such weakening accompanied the fall of three dynasties and now could be lessening precipitation in northern China. Results of the study, led by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Lanzhou University in China, appear in the journal Science. The work rests on climate records preserved in the layers of stone in a 118-millimeter-long stalagmite found in Wanxiang Cave in Gansu Province, China. By measuring amounts of the elements uranium and thorium throughout the stalagmite, the researchers could tell the date each layer was formed. And by analyzing the "signatures" of two forms of oxygen in the stalagmite, they could match amounts of rainfall--a measure of summer monsoon strength--to those dates. The stalagmite was formed over 1,810 years; stone at its base dates from A.D. 190, and stone at its tip was laid down in A.D. 2003, the year the stalagmite was collected. "It was unexpected that a record of surface weather would be preserved in underground cave deposits," said David Verardo, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Paleoclimatology Program, which funded the research. "These results illustrate the promise of paleoclimate science to look beyond the obvious and see new possibilities." "Summer monsoon winds originate in the Indian Ocean and sweep into China," said Hai Cheng, author of the paper and a scientist at the University of Minnesota. "When the summer monsoon is stronger, it pushes farther northwest into China." These moisture-laden winds bring rain necessary for cultivating rice. But when the monsoon is weak, the rains stall farther south and east, depriving northern and western parts of China of summer rains. A lack of rainfall could have contributed to social upheaval and the fall of dynasties. The researchers discovered that periods of weak summer monsoons coincided with the last years of the Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties, which are known to have been times of popular unrest. Conversely, the scientists found that a strong summer monsoon prevailed during one of China's "golden ages," the Northern Song Dynasty. The ample summer monsoon rains may have contributed to the rapid expansion of rice cultivation from southern China to the midsection of the country. During the Northern Song Dynasty, rice first became China's main staple crop, and China's population doubled. "The waxing and waning of summer monsoon rains are just one piece of the puzzle of changing climate and culture around the world," said Larry Edwards, geologist at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the paper. For example, the study showed that the dry period at the end of the Tang Dynasty coincided with a previously identified drought halfway around the world, in Meso-America, which has been linked to the fall of the Mayan civilization. The study also showed that the ample summer rains of the Northern Song Dynasty coincided with the beginning of the well-known Medieval Warm Period in Europe and Greenland. During this time--the late 10th century--Vikings colonized southern Greenland. Centuries later, a series of weak monsoons prevailed as Europe and Greenland shivered through what geologists call the Little Ice Age. In the 14th and early 15th centuries, as the cold of the Little Ice Age settled into Greenland, the Vikings disappeared from there. At the same time, on the other side of the world, the weak monsoons of the 14th century coincided with the end of the Yuan Dynasty. A second major finding concerns the relationship between temperature and the strength of the monsoons. For most of the last 1,810 years, as average temperatures rose, so, too, did the strength of the summer monsoon. That relationship flipped, however, around 1960, a sign that the late 20th century weakening of the monsoon and drying in northwestern China was caused by human activity. If carbon dioxide is the culprit, as some have proposed, the drying trend may well continue in Inner Mongolia, northern China and neighboring areas on the fringes of the monsoon's reach. If, however, the culprit is man-made soot, as others have proposed, the trend could be reversed, the researchers said, by reduction of soot emissions. The research also was supported by the National Science Foundation of China and the Gary Comer Science and Education Foundation. Adapted from materials provided by National Science Foundation.

Water Wars!

Oh, this is just too precious to pass up posting. From that BASTION of Truth, Justice, and the former SOVIET (now RUSSIAN) Way. What's the opposite of the movie "Water World?" Yikes! Mankind to wage wars for water by 2025 15.07.2008 [What - 2025? Come on, darlings! We'll be whacking off each other's heads and swiping out each other's eyeballs for the fluid by 2015, if not before...] The shortage of fresh water on planet Earth is likely to become the biggest problem ever during the forthcoming decades. Experts from the International Water Management Institute said in their recent report that the water crisis in the world would occur because of the growing number of population. According to the UN, the population of planet Earth will grow from 6 to 8.5 billion people by 2030. One person living in an industrially developed country consumes up to 3,000 liters of water a year. If the global population grows by 2.5 billion, it will be necessary to find additional 2,000 cubic kilometers of water for their living. “The global consumption of water has increased six times during the recent 100 years and will double by 2050. There are countries that have already run out of water reserves for the production of their food. The shortage of fresh water will inevitably boost prices on this resource,” the Director of the International Water Management Institute, Frank Rijsberman said. The accelerating urbanization and the rising living standard will set forth new requirements to the quality of water. Drinking water and industrial water is obtained from one and the same sources. It may just so happen that agricultural producers, for example, will face serious problems with the required volumes of water. Mankind will have to deal with a serious shortage of water in 25 years. Earth’s fresh water reserves will not be enough to feed the growing population of the planet. Specialists say that one should take urgent measures now to solve the water problem. The list of measures includes the construction of water reservoirs, the use of rain water for irrigation of fields and gardens, etc. It is not the first time when futurologists raise the water crisis subject. They believe that the crisis may occur even before the planet runs out of its fresh water. The shortage of water can be accompanied with large-scale military conflicts. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon raised the subject in December 2007 at the first Asian-Pacific Water Forum, which took place in Japan. Ban Ki-moon said that one-third of Earth’s population lives in the areas, which already suffer from the lack of water. More importantly, about 1.1 billion people living on the planet nowadays do not have access to fresh water which poses no health risks. Humans still pollute water sources irresponsibly and do not seem to care about the consequences. Rest of article.

Well, Duh!

From The New York Times Water-Starved California Slows Development By JENNIFER STEINHAUER Published: June 7, 2008 PERRIS, Calif. — As California faces one of its worst droughts in two decades, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies. Water authorities and other government agencies scattered throughout the state, including here in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, have begun denying, delaying or challenging authorization for dozens of housing tracts and other developments under a state law that requires a 20-year water supply as a condition for building. California officials suggested that the actions were only the beginning, and they worry about the impact on a state that has grown into an economic powerhouse over the last several decades. The state law was enacted in 2001, but until statewide water shortages, it had not been invoked to hold up projects. While previous droughts and supply problems have led to severe water cutbacks and rationing, water officials said the outright refusal to sign off on projects over water scarcity had until now been virtually unheard of on a statewide scale. “Businesses are telling us that they can’t get things done because of water,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said in a telephone interview. On Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger declared an official statewide drought, the first such designation since 1991. As the governor was making his drought announcement, the Eastern Municipal Water District in Riverside County — one of the fastest-growing counties in the state in recent years — gave a provisional nod to nine projects that it had held up for months because of water concerns. The approval came with the caveat that the water district could revisit its decision, and only after adjustments had been made to the plans to reduce water demand. “The statement that we’re making is that this isn’t business as usual,” said Randy A. Record, a water district board member, at the meeting here in Perris. Shawn Jenkins, a developer who had two projects caught up in the delays, said he was accustomed to piles of paperwork and reams of red tape in getting projects approved. But he was not prepared to have the water district hold up the projects he was planning. He changed the projects’ landscaping, to make it less water dependent, as the board pondered their fate. “I think this is a warning for everyone,” Mr. Jenkins said. Also in Riverside County, a superior court judge recently stopped a 1,500-home development project, citing, among others things, a failure to provide substantial evidence of adequate water supply. In San Luis Obispo County, north of Los Angeles, the City of Pismo Beach was recently denied the right to annex unincorporated land to build a large multipurpose project because, “the city didn’t have enough water to adequately serve the development,” said Paul Hood, the executive officer of the commission that approves the annexations and incorporations of cities. In agriculturally rich Kern County, north of Los Angeles, at least three developers scrapped plans recently to apply for permits, realizing water was going to be an issue. An official from the county’s planning department said the developers were the first ever in the county to be stymied by water concerns. Large-scale housing developments in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties have met a similar fate, officials in those counties said. Throughout the state, other projects have been suspended or are being revised to accommodate water shortages, and water authorities and cities have increasingly begun to consider holding off on “will-serve” letters — promises to developers to provide water — for new projects. “The water in our state is not sufficient to add more demand,” said Lester Snow, the director of the California Department of Water Resources. “And that now means that some large development can’t go forward. If we don’t make changes with water, we are going to have a major economic problem in this state.” The words “crisis” and “water” have gone together in this state since the 49ers traded flecks of gold for food. But several factors have combined to make the current water crisis more acute than those of recent years. Rest of article.