Role Model?

(Originally posted on waterefficiency.net)

By Elizabeth Cutright
Editor
Water Efficiency

Is China changing its tune? In August of last year, I discussed water use (and misuse) in China.
Drowning the Dragon
At the time, the Olympics were just around the corner, and all the preparation and fanfare surrounding the event had focused on China’s efforts to host a “green Olympics,” but very little attention—relatively speaking—had been paid to long-term effects of all this development. Specifically, how the radical rearrangement of Beijing’s urban landscape was adversely effecting the country’s water resources. By rerouting 80 billion gallons of once-rural water into the city, farms and villages surrounding Beijing were drying up. In order to generate enough supply to meet demand, the Beijing authorities pushed through several infrastructure projects—canals, pipes, pumps, you name it—in order to channel as much water as possible into the city.
I finished my blog relating a friend’s story about a trip down the Yangtze river prior to the completion of the Three Gorges Dam (which moved 1.4 million people and flooded a 410-mile-long area in the middle of the river). Travelling by boat through the heart of China, my friend described the eerie silence as they floated along a river hugged on either side by abandoned villages and cities—all completely silent now that its residents had been evacuated ahead of the massive flooding that would occur once the dam was completed. As the river continued along its stately route, ghost towns, one after the other, dotted the shore.
For many years, environmentalists and scientists have urged China to take a different approach, to look beyond large dams and the elaborate rerouting of natural waterways and, instead, focus on efficiency and conservation. Wouldn’t China’s resources be better utilized—the argument goes—by focusing on water recycling and even desalination. It seems that perhaps the government of China is ready to listen—that country’s choices could provide lessons to areas all over the globe that struggle to deal with diminished supply and expanding demand.
The newest projection of China’s agenda involves the construction of three canals along the Yangtze, in order to divert thousands of gallons of water over hundreds of miles to Beijing and other urban areas in the north. The project is estimated to cost $62 billion and is designed to transfer 12 trillion gallons a year from the Yangtze to the increasingly urban north. And, like the mass exodus prior to the Three Gorges Dam, more than 350,000 people living in the cross-hairs of this new project will be forced to move. The outcry has, of course, been loud and passionate.
Critics worry that diverting water of the Yangtze will cause algae blooms, thereby making the river—already, by polluted factories—that much more contaminated. Environmentalists point out that increasing supply to Beijing and it’s neighbors will only promote waste and inefficiency.
Surprisingly, government officials seem to have listened to at least some of the protests. Some parts of the project have been postponed for further study, and the officials have begun to admit that despite the scope and scale of this project, it will do little to supply the North’s ever-increasing demand for water.
“It can only be a supplement to the water shortage in the short term,” Zhang Jiyao, the minister in charge of the water project, told The Associated Press. “More important, we must depend on saving water.”
If China is successfully in solving its water woes through conservation and efficiency, could the country provide a blueprint that other similarly challenged communities could emulate? Could China become a role model instead of an example of “what not to do?”