China's Water Crisis (Voices of Asia)

"Well, there are several things happening. North China, Beijing, is on the edge of desert and there’s been a huge population growth which is unsustainable. There isn’t enough rainfall to sustain a population, so they’ve been drilling deeper and deeper into the aquifers which are going to be exhausted quite soon. At the same time, because of poor environmental policies, the Yellow River, the mother river of China and where Chinese civilisation began, now fails to reach the sea for much of the year. This is because of over-extraction, but also because of degradation at the head-waters: deforestation, desertification. So there’s less water coming down it, there’s more water being taken out of it, and the alternative sources – the aquifers – are running out. And if you add to that uncontrolled industrialisation… Very little of the waste water in China, either industrial or domestic, is treated. They’ve taken the cheapest form of development which has the highest environmental cost. So if you’re pumping raw sewage into the rivers that carry your drinking water, along with industrial effluent, you run out of water. You end up with such water as you do have – which in any event is not enough – being unfit for any purpose whatsoever, as a great deal of water now is in China. You can’t even use it for irrigation. Well, the way China’s approached water management – again, over centuries – is that they’ve always tried to engineer their way out of a problem. There are two approaches: one is conservation and the other is engineering, and the Chinese have always favoured engineering from the Grand Canal onwards. They still do favour engineering: mega-projects like the Three Gorges Dam, or the big one now, which is the South-North Water Transfer. South China and West China for now have water and they propose this massive bit of engineering which will divert water from the south to the north. Now the problem is that in the long term, in 25 years, west China – or as some would say, Tibet – which currently holds the largest frozen store of fresh water outside the poles may not look the same. Unfortunately, it’s something of a climate change hotspot, something that China is also contributing to, having become the largest emitter of carbons in the world. The temperatures on the Tibetan plateau are rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and that means that the glaciers are melting. They’re melting quite rapidly. And that means that all the rivers that derive from them, which includes the Yellow River and the Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, the Indus – the eight great rivers of Asia, which derive to a greater or a lesser degree from these glaciers – will first flow faster and then shrink, and they will probably become seasonal. And that means that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population is facing long-term, severe water shortage. Including, of course, China. So the diversion of water from the Brahmaputra to North China is of concern, not only for environmentalists but to everybody downstream, and that includes an awful lot of countries and an awful lot of people. China is sitting on the tap. China is the only country in that part of the world that is currently damming transnational rivers. No. International law is extremely weak on this, and there are no trans-boundary agreements in that part of the world, except on the Indus. That is one of those agreements that’s survived international hostilities of all kinds, because of course it involves India and Pakistan, and it’s held up despite everything that’s happened. But there are no trans-boundary agreements involving all the states on the other rivers. It’s one of the things that I feel we ought to pay some rather urgent attention to before this becomes a dispute. Water scarcity can become a source of conflict. Certainly India, being one of the downstream countries, is extremely concerned about China’s dam-building. There’s a famous book which was promoted by the China Ministry for Water Resources, provocatively entitled Tibet’s Water Will Save China. Well, Tibet’s water isn’t China’s water. Tibet’s water belongs to Asia . If you look at that region from the air, there’s this great horseshoe of mountains, and all the rivers in Asia derive from those mountains."