It's been an odd week and a stressful one. Therefore I'm afraid I'm not offering terribly much of importance this week.
However, I did see this: http://maggiesnotebook.blogspot.com/2008/08/obamas-admiration-of-china-country-with.html
Despite the fact that I prefer Obama to McCain, although I could not stand Clinton or Huckabee, I'm afraid I agree with her statements.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Interesting Guangzhou blog post.
As mentioned, I have started a new job and therefore am only working on this blog once a week.
I stumbled across this: http://fareo.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/water-supply-in-guangzhou/ and found it interesting. It seems that not only do Chinese people have confusion about their water, but some water companies in China consider a "unique taste" to be an asset that marks their brand.
I thought this was interesting too: http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/node_10/node_37/node_85/2008/08/15/121876748448099.shtml although quite frankly I'm not quite sure how much of it to believe or what to make of it. (For instance, it says water quality has improved. It doesn't say what the current state of water quality is.)
I stumbled across this: http://fareo.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/water-supply-in-guangzhou/ and found it interesting. It seems that not only do Chinese people have confusion about their water, but some water companies in China consider a "unique taste" to be an asset that marks their brand.
I thought this was interesting too: http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/node_10/node_37/node_85/2008/08/15/121876748448099.shtml although quite frankly I'm not quite sure how much of it to believe or what to make of it. (For instance, it says water quality has improved. It doesn't say what the current state of water quality is.)
Sunday, August 17, 2008
China Water: World Bank reports on China's water problems.
For those who are interested, reports from the World Bank on China's water problems:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/EXTEAPREGTOPENVIRONMENT/0,,contentMDK:21028556~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:502886,00.html#reports
And, with that, I now must go and stop blogging and instead start reading. It's one thing to sound like an expert, it's an another if one wishes to actually have knowledge of the subject when doing so.
(Tee hee!)
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/EXTEAPREGTOPENVIRONMENT/0,,contentMDK:21028556~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:502886,00.html#reports
And, with that, I now must go and stop blogging and instead start reading. It's one thing to sound like an expert, it's an another if one wishes to actually have knowledge of the subject when doing so.
(Tee hee!)
China Water: dropping ground water levels.
http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=3068
Falling water tables threatens grain harvests
Posted: 08 Aug 2007
As China's farmers sink their pumps ever lower and aquifers begin to run dry grain harvests could be in serious trouble says Lester Brown in this wide-ranging report on the problem.
As the world's demand for water has tripled over the last half-century and as the demand for hydroelectric power has grown even faster, dams and diversions of river water have drained many rivers dry. As water tables fall, the springs that feed rivers go dry, reducing river flows.
Scores of countries are overpumping aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water needs, including each of the big three grain producers - China, India, and the United States. More than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling.
Massive amounts of water are used
to irrigate cropland in California
� Inga Spence/Holt Studios International
There are two types of aquifers: replenishable and nonreplenishable (or fossil) aquifers. Most of the aquifers in India and the shallow aquifer under the North China Plain are replenishable. When these are depleted, the maximum rate of pumping is automatically reduced to the rate of recharge.
For fossil aquifers, such as the vast US Ogallala aquifer, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain, or the Saudi aquifer, depletion brings pumping to an end. Farmers who lose their irrigation water have the option of returning to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits. In more arid regions, however, such as in the southwestern United States or the Middle East, the loss of irrigation water means the end of agriculture.
1000-feet pumps
The US embassy in Beijing reports that Chinese wheat farmers in some areas are now pumping from a depth of 300 metres, or nearly 1,000 feet. Pumping water from this far down raises pumping costs so high that farmers are often forced to abandon irrigation and return to less productive dryland farming. A World Bank study indicates that China is overpumping three river basins in the north - the Hai, which flows through Beijing and Tianjin; the Yellow; and the Huai, the next river south of the Yellow. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, the shortfall in the Hai basin of nearly 40 billion tons of water per year (1 ton equals 1 cubic metre) means that when the aquifer is depleted, the grain harvest will drop by 40 million tons - enough to feed 120 million Chinese.
A polluted section of the Yangtze
A polluted section of the Yangtze. Photo � China Features
In India, water shortages are particularly serious simply because the margin between actual food consumption and survival is so precarious. In a survey of India's water situation, Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist that the 21 million wells drilled are lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 metres (20 feet) per year. In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere and falling water tables have dried up 95 percent of the wells owned by small farmers, reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade.
As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water, going as deep as 1,000 metres in some locations. In communities where underground water sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is rain-fed and drinking water is trucked in. Tushaar Shah, who heads the International Water Management Institute's groundwater station in Gujarat, says of India's water situation, "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India."
In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas - three leading grain-producing states - the underground water table has dropped by more than 30 metres (100 feet). As a result, wells have gone dry on thousands of farms in the southern Great Plains. Although this mining of underground water is taking a toll on U.S. grain production, irrigated land accounts for only one fifth of the U.S. grain harvest, compared with close to three fifths of the harvest in India and four fifths in China.
Pakistan, a country with 158 million people that is growing by 3 million per year, is also mining its underground water. In the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from 1 to nearly 2 metres a year.
In the province of Baluchistan, water tables around the capital, Quetta, are falling by 3.5 meters per year. Richard Garstang, a water expert with the World Wildlife Fund and a participant in a study of Pakistan's water situation, said in 2001 that "within 15 years Quetta will run out of water if the current consumption rate continues."
Iran villages abandoned
Iran, a country of 70 million people, is overpumping its aquifers by an average of 5 billion tons of water per year, the water equivalent of one third of its annual grain harvest. Under the small but agriculturally rich Chenaran Plain in northeastern Iran, the water table was falling by 2.8 metres a year in the late 1990s. New wells being drilled both for irrigation and to supply the nearby city of Mashad are responsible. Villages in eastern Iran are being abandoned as wells go dry, generating a flow of "water refugees."
Saudi Arabia, a country of 25 million people, is as water-poor as it is oil-rich. Relying heavily on subsidies, it developed an extensive irrigated agriculture based largely on its deep fossil aquifer. After several years of using oil money to support wheat prices at five times the world market level, the government was forced to face fiscal reality and cut the subsidies. Its wheat harvest dropped from a high of 4 million tons in 1992 to some 2 million tons in 2005. Some Saudi farmers are now pumping water from wells that are 1,200 metres deep (nearly four-fifths of a mile).
In neighbouring Yemen, a nation of 21 million, the water table under most of the country is falling by roughly 2 metres a year as water use outstrips the sustainable yield of aquifers. In western Yemen's Sana'a Basin, the estimated annual water extraction of 224 million tons exceeds the annual recharge of 42 million tons by a factor of five, dropping the water table 6 metres per year. World Bank projections indicate the Sana'a Basin - site of the national capital, Sana'a, and home to 2 million people - will be pumped dry by 2010.
In the search for water, the Yemeni government has drilled test wells in the basin that are 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) deep - depths normally associated with the oil industry - but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon decide whether to bring water to Sana'a, possibly by pipeline from coastal desalting plants, if it can afford it, or to relocate the capital. Either alternative will be costly and potentially traumatic.
Israel's growing population
Israel, even though it is a pioneer in raising irrigation water productivity, is depleting both of its principal aquifers - the coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer that it shares with Palestinians. Israel's population, whose growth is fueled by both natural increase and immigration, is outgrowing its water supply. Conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over the allocation of water in the latter area are ongoing. Because of severe water shortages, Israel has banned the irrigation of wheat.
In Mexico - home to a population of 107 million that is projected to reach 140 million by 2050 - the demand for water is outstripping supply. Mexico City's water problems are well known. Rural areas are also suffering. For example, in the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by 2 metres or more a year. At the national level, 51 per cent of all the water extracted from underground is from aquifers that are being overpumped.
Advancing front irrigation, Chihuahua Desert, Mexico
Advancing front irrigation is one of the irrigation systems used in the agricultural zones of Delicias, Chihuahua Desert, Mexico. � WWF-Canon/Edward Parker
Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come at roughly the same time. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially unmanageable food scarcity.
Disappearing rivers
While falling water tables are largely hidden, rivers that are drained dry before they reach the sea are highly visible. Two rivers where this phenomenon can be seen are the Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States, and the Yellow, the largest river in northern China. Other large rivers that either run dry or are reduced to a mere trickle during the dry season are the Nile, the lifeline of Egypt; the Indus, which supplies most of Pakistan's irrigation water; and the Ganges in India's densely populated Gangetic basin. Many smaller rivers have disappeared entirely.
Since 1950, the number of large dams, those over 15 meters high, has increased from 5,000 to 45,000. Each dam deprives a river of some of its flow. Engineers like to say that dams built to generate electricity do not take water from the river, only its energy, but this is not entirely true since reservoirs increase evaporation. The annual loss of water from a reservoir in arid or semiarid regions, where evaporation rates are high, is typically equal to 10 percent of its storage capacity.
The Colorado River now rarely makes it to the sea. With the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and, most important, California depending heavily on the Colorado's water, the river is simply drained dry before it reaches the Gulf of California. This excessive demand for water is destroying the river's ecosystem, including its fisheries.
Stranded tanker at Aralsk on the
Aral Sea�s north shore in Kazakstan.
� Don Hinrichsen
Stranded tanker at Aralsk on the Aral Sea�s north shore in Kazakhstan. Photo � Don Hinrichsen
A similar situation exists in Central Asia. The Amu Darya - which, along with the Syr Darya, feeds the Aral Sea - is diverted to irrigate the cotton fields of Central Asia. In the late 1980s, water levels dropped so low that the sea split in two. While recent efforts to revitalize the North Aral Sea have raised the water level somewhat, the South Aral Sea will likely never recover.
China's Yellow River, which flows some 4,000 kilometres through five provinces before it reaches the Yellow Sea, has been under mounting pressure for several decades. It first ran dry in 1972. Since 1985 it has often failed to reach the sea, although better management and greater reservoir capacity have facilitated year-round flow in recent years.
The Nile, site of another ancient civilization, now barely makes it to the sea. Water analyst Sandra Postel, in Pillar of Sand, notes that before the Aswan Dam was built, some 32 billion cubic meters of water reached the Mediterranean each year. After the dam was completed, however, increasing irrigation, evaporation, and other demands reduced its discharge to less than 2 billion cubic metres.
Pakistan, like Egypt, is essentially a river-based civilization, heavily dependent on the Indus. This river, originating in the Himalayas and flowing westward to the Indian Ocean, not only provides surface water, it also recharges aquifers that supply the irrigation wells dotting the Pakistani countryside. In the face of growing water demand, it too is starting to run dry in its lower reaches. Pakistan, with a population projected to reach 305 million by 2050, is in trouble.
Damming the Mekong
In Southeast Asia, the flow of the Mekong is being reduced by the dams being built on its upper reaches by the Chinese. The downstream countries, including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Viet Nam - countries with 168 million people - complain about the reduced flow of the Mekong, but this has done little to curb China's efforts to exploit the power and the water in the river.
The same problem exists with the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which originate in Turkey and flow through Syria and Iraq en route to the Persian Gulf. This river system, the site of Sumer and other early civilizations, is being overused. Large dams erected in Turkey and Iraq have reduced water flow to the once "fertile crescent," helping to destroy more than 90 percent of the formerly vast wetlands that enriched the delta region.
In the river systems just mentioned, virtually all the water in the basin is being used. Inevitably, if people upstream use more water, those downstream will get less. As demands continue to grow, balancing water demand and supply is imperative. Failure to do so means that water tables will continue to fall, more rivers will run dry, and more lakes and wetlands will disappear.
Lester R.Brown is President of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.
This article is adapted from Chapter 3, "Emerging Water Shortages" in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), available
free of charge on-line at www.earthpolicy.org
China Water: Illegal water well drilling.
Although this dates from September 8, 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/asia/28water.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
September 28, 2007
Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future Is Drying Up
By JIM YARDLEY
SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater.
Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table.
“People who are buying apartments aren’t thinking about whether there will be water in the future,” said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for 20 years to raise public awareness about the city’s dire water situation.
For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand keeps rising everywhere.
China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.
One example is grain. The Communist Party, leery of depending on imports to feed the country, has long insisted on grain self-sufficiency. But growing so much grain consumes huge amounts of underground water in the North China Plain, which produces half the country’s wheat. Some scientists say farming in the rapidly urbanizing region should be restricted to protect endangered aquifers. Yet doing so could threaten the livelihoods of millions of farmers and cause a spike in international grain prices.
For the Communist Party, the immediate challenge is the prosaic task of forcing the world’s most dynamic economy to conserve and protect clean water. Water pollution is so widespread that regulators say a major incident occurs every other day. Municipal and industrial dumping has left sections of many rivers “unfit for human contact.”
Cities like Beijing and Tianjin have shown progress on water conservation, but China’s economy continues to emphasize growth. Industry in China uses 3 to 10 times more water, depending on the product, than industries in developed nations.
“We have to now focus on conservation,” said Ma Jun, a prominent environmentalist. “We don’t have much extra water resources. We have the same resources and much bigger pressures from growth.”
In the past, the Communist Party has reflexively turned to engineering projects to address water problems, and now it is reaching back to one of Mao’s unrealized plans: the $62 billion South-to-North Water Transfer Project to funnel more than 12 trillion gallons northward every year along three routes from the Yangtze River basin, where water is more abundant. The project, if fully built, would be completed in 2050. The eastern and central lines are already under construction; the western line, the most disputed because of environmental concerns, remains in the planning stages.
The North China Plain undoubtedly needs any water it can get. An economic powerhouse with more than 200 million people, it has limited rainfall and depends on groundwater for 60 percent of its supply. Other countries, like Yemen, India, Mexico and the United States, have aquifers that are being drained to dangerously low levels. But scientists say those below the North China Plain may be drained within 30 years.
“There’s no uncertainty,” said Richard Evans, a hydrologist who has worked in China for two decades and has served as a consultant to the World Bank and China’s Ministry of Water Resources. “The rate of decline is very clear, very well documented. They will run out of groundwater if the current rate continues.”
Outside Shijiazhuang, construction crews are working on the transfer project’s central line, which will provide the city with infusions of water on the way to the final destination, Beijing. For many of the engineers and workers, the job carries a patriotic gloss.
Yet while many scientists agree that the project will provide an important influx of water, they also say it will not be a cure-all. No one knows how much clean water the project will deliver; pollution problems are already arising on the eastern line. Cities and industry will be the beneficiaries of the new water, but the impact on farming is limited. Water deficits are expected to remain.
“Many people are asking the question: What can they do?” said Zheng Chunmiao, a leading international groundwater expert. “They just cannot continue with current practices. They have to find a way to bring the problem under control.”
A Drying Region
On a drizzly, polluted morning last April, Wang Baosheng steered his Chinese-made sport utility vehicle out of a shopping center on the west side of Beijing for a three-hour southbound commute that became a tour of the water crisis on the North China Plain.
Mr. Wang travels several times a month to Shijiazhuang, where he is chief engineer overseeing construction of three miles of the central line of the water transfer project. A light rain splattered the windshield, and he recited a Chinese proverb about the preciousness of spring showers for farmers. He also noticed one dead river after another as his S.U.V. glided over dusty, barren riverbeds: the Yongding, the Yishui, the Xia and, finally, the Hutuo. “You see all these streams with bridges, but there is no water,” he said.
A century or so ago, the North China Plain was a healthy ecosystem, scientists say. Farmers digging wells could strike water within eight feet. Streams and creeks meandered through the region. Swamps, natural springs and wetlands were common.
Today, the region, comparable in size to New Mexico, is parched. Roughly five-sixths of the wetlands have dried up, according to one study. Scientists say that most natural streams or creeks have disappeared. Several rivers that once were navigable are now mostly dust and brush. The largest natural freshwater lake in northern China, Lake Baiyangdian, is steadily contracting and besieged with pollution.
What happened? The list includes misguided policies, unintended consequences, a population explosion, climate change and, most of all, relentless economic growth. In 1963, a flood paralyzed the region, prompting Mao to construct a flood-control system of dams, reservoirs and concrete spillways. Flood control improved but the ecological balance was altered as the dams began choking off rivers that once flowed eastward into the North China Plain.
The new reservoirs gradually became major water suppliers for growing cities like Shijiazhuang. Farmers, the region’s biggest water users, began depending almost exclusively on wells. Rainfall steadily declined in what some scientists now believe is a consequence of climate change.
Before, farmers had compensated for the region’s limited annual rainfall by planting only three crops every two years. But underground water seemed limitless and government policies pushed for higher production, so farmers began planting a second annual crop, usually winter wheat, which requires a lot of water.
By the 1970s, studies show, the water table was already falling. Then Mao’s death and the introduction of market-driven economic reforms spurred a farming renaissance. Production soared, and rural incomes rose. The water table kept falling, further drying out wetlands and rivers.
Around 1900, Shijiazhuang was a collection of farming villages. By 1950, the population had reached 335,000. This year, the city has roughly 2.3 million people with a metropolitan area population of 9 million.
More people meant more demand for water, and the city now heavily pumps groundwater. The water table is falling more than a meter a year. Today, some city wells must descend more than 600 feet to reach clean water. In the deepest drilling areas, steep downward funnels have formed in the water table that are known as “cones of depression.”
Groundwater quality also has worsened. Wastewater, often untreated, is now routinely dumped into rivers and open channels. Mr. Zheng, the water specialist, said studies showed that roughly three-quarters of the region’s entire aquifer system was now suffering some level of contamination.
“There will be no sustainable development in the future if there is no groundwater supply,” said Liu Changming, a leading Chinese hydrology expert and a senior scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A National Project
Three decades ago, when Deng Xiaoping shifted China from Maoist ideology and fixated the country on economic growth, a generation of technocrats gradually took power and began rebuilding a country that ideology had almost destroyed. Today, the top leaders of the Communist Party — including Hu Jintao, China’s president and party chief — were trained as engineers.
Though not members of the political elite, Wang Baosheng, the engineer on the water transfer project, and his colleague Yang Guangjie are of the same background. This spring, at the site outside Shijiazhuang, bulldozers clawed at a V-shaped cut in the dirt while teams of workers in blue jumpsuits and orange hard hats smoothed wet cement over a channel that will be almost as wide as a football field.
“I’ve been to the Hoover Dam, and I really admire the people who built that,” said Mr. Yang, the project manager. “At the time, they were making a huge contribution to the development of their country.”
He compared China’s transfer project to the water diversion system devised for southern California in the last century. “Maybe we are like America in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “We’re building the country.”
China’s disadvantage, compared with the United States, is that it has a smaller water supply yet almost five times as many people. China has about 7 percent of the world’s water resources and roughly 20 percent of its population. It also has a severe regional water imbalance, with about four-fifths of the water supply in the south.
Mao’s vision of borrowing water from the Yangtze for the north had an almost profound simplicity, but engineers and scientists spent decades debating the project before the government approved it, partly out of desperation, in 2002. Today, demand is far greater in the north, and water quality has badly deteriorated in the south. Roughly 41 percent of China’s wastewater is now dumped in the Yangtze, raising concerns that siphoning away clean water northward will exacerbate pollution problems in the south.
The upper reaches of the central line are expected to be finished in time to provide water to Beijing for the Olympic Games next year. Mr. Evans, the World Bank consultant, called the complete project “essential” but added that success would depend on avoiding waste and efficiently distributing the water.
Mr. Liu, the scholar and hydrologist, said that farming would get none of the new water and that cities and industry must quickly improve wastewater treatment. Otherwise, he said, cities will use the new water to dump more polluted wastewater. Shijiazhuang now dumps untreated wastewater into a canal that local farmers use to irrigate fields.
For years, Chinese officials thought irrigation efficiency was the answer for reversing groundwater declines. Eloise Kendy, a hydrology expert with The Nature Conservancy who has studied the North China Plain, said that farmers had made improvements but that the water table had kept sinking. Ms. Kendy said the spilled water previously considered “wasted” had actually soaked into the soil and recharged the aquifer. Efficiency erased that recharge. Farmers also used efficiency gains to irrigate more land.
Ms. Kendy said scientists had discovered that the water table was dropping because of water lost by evaporation and transpiration from the soil, plants and leaves. This lost water is a major reason the water table keeps dropping, scientists say.
Farmers have no choice. They drill deeper.
Difficult Choices Ahead
For many people living in the North China Plain, the notion of a water crisis seems distant. No one is crawling across a parched desert in search of an oasis. But every year, the water table keeps dropping. Nationally, groundwater usage has almost doubled since 1970 and now accounts for one-fifth of the country’s total water usage, according to the China Geological Survey Bureau.
The Communist Party is fully aware of the problems. A new water pollution law is under consideration that would sharply increase fines against polluters. Different coastal cities are building desalination plants. Multinational waste treatment companies are being recruited to help tackle the enormous wastewater problem.
Many scientists believe that huge gains can still be reaped by better efficiency and conservation. In north China, pilot projects are under way to try to reduce water loss from winter wheat crops. Some cities have raised the price of water to promote conservation, but it remains subsidized in most places. Already, some cities along the route of the transfer project are recoiling because of the planned higher prices. Some say they may just continue pumping.
Tough political choices, though, seem unavoidable. Studies by different scientists have concluded that the rising water demands in the North China Plain make it unfeasible for farmers to continue planting a winter crop. The international ramifications would be significant if China became an ever bigger customer on world grain markets. Some analysts have long warned that grain prices could steadily rise, contributing to inflation and making it harder for other developing countries to buy food.
The social implications would also be significant inside China. Near Shijiazhuang, Wang Jingyan’s farming village depends on wells that are more than 600 feet deep. Not planting winter wheat would amount to economic suicide.
“We would lose 60 percent or 70 percent of our income if we didn’t plant winter wheat,” Mr. Wang said. “Everyone here plants winter wheat.”
Another water proposal is also radical: huge, rapid urbanization. Scientists say converting farmland into urban areas would save enough water to stop the drop in the water table, if not reverse it, because widespread farming still uses more water than urban areas. Of course, large-scale urbanization, already under way, could worsen air quality; Shijiazhuang’s air already ranks among the worst in China because of heavy industrial pollution.
For now, Shijiazhuang’s priority, like that of other major Chinese cities, is to grow as quickly as possible. The city’s gross domestic product has risen by an average of 10 percent every year since 1980, even as the city’s per capita rate of available water is now only one thirty-third of the world average.
“We have a water shortage, but we have to develop,” said Wang Yongli, a senior engineer with the city’s water conservation bureau. “And development is going to be put first.”
Mr. Wang has spent four decades charting the steady extinction of the North China Plain’s aquifer. Water in Shijiazhuang, with more than 800 illegal wells, is as scarce as it is in Israel, he said. “In Israel, people regard water as more important than life itself,” he said. “In Shijiazhuang, it’s not that way. People are focused on the economy.”
Jake Hooker contributed reporting from north China. Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Beijing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/asia/28water.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
September 28, 2007
Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future Is Drying Up
By JIM YARDLEY
SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater.
Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table.
“People who are buying apartments aren’t thinking about whether there will be water in the future,” said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for 20 years to raise public awareness about the city’s dire water situation.
For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand keeps rising everywhere.
China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.
One example is grain. The Communist Party, leery of depending on imports to feed the country, has long insisted on grain self-sufficiency. But growing so much grain consumes huge amounts of underground water in the North China Plain, which produces half the country’s wheat. Some scientists say farming in the rapidly urbanizing region should be restricted to protect endangered aquifers. Yet doing so could threaten the livelihoods of millions of farmers and cause a spike in international grain prices.
For the Communist Party, the immediate challenge is the prosaic task of forcing the world’s most dynamic economy to conserve and protect clean water. Water pollution is so widespread that regulators say a major incident occurs every other day. Municipal and industrial dumping has left sections of many rivers “unfit for human contact.”
Cities like Beijing and Tianjin have shown progress on water conservation, but China’s economy continues to emphasize growth. Industry in China uses 3 to 10 times more water, depending on the product, than industries in developed nations.
“We have to now focus on conservation,” said Ma Jun, a prominent environmentalist. “We don’t have much extra water resources. We have the same resources and much bigger pressures from growth.”
In the past, the Communist Party has reflexively turned to engineering projects to address water problems, and now it is reaching back to one of Mao’s unrealized plans: the $62 billion South-to-North Water Transfer Project to funnel more than 12 trillion gallons northward every year along three routes from the Yangtze River basin, where water is more abundant. The project, if fully built, would be completed in 2050. The eastern and central lines are already under construction; the western line, the most disputed because of environmental concerns, remains in the planning stages.
The North China Plain undoubtedly needs any water it can get. An economic powerhouse with more than 200 million people, it has limited rainfall and depends on groundwater for 60 percent of its supply. Other countries, like Yemen, India, Mexico and the United States, have aquifers that are being drained to dangerously low levels. But scientists say those below the North China Plain may be drained within 30 years.
“There’s no uncertainty,” said Richard Evans, a hydrologist who has worked in China for two decades and has served as a consultant to the World Bank and China’s Ministry of Water Resources. “The rate of decline is very clear, very well documented. They will run out of groundwater if the current rate continues.”
Outside Shijiazhuang, construction crews are working on the transfer project’s central line, which will provide the city with infusions of water on the way to the final destination, Beijing. For many of the engineers and workers, the job carries a patriotic gloss.
Yet while many scientists agree that the project will provide an important influx of water, they also say it will not be a cure-all. No one knows how much clean water the project will deliver; pollution problems are already arising on the eastern line. Cities and industry will be the beneficiaries of the new water, but the impact on farming is limited. Water deficits are expected to remain.
“Many people are asking the question: What can they do?” said Zheng Chunmiao, a leading international groundwater expert. “They just cannot continue with current practices. They have to find a way to bring the problem under control.”
A Drying Region
On a drizzly, polluted morning last April, Wang Baosheng steered his Chinese-made sport utility vehicle out of a shopping center on the west side of Beijing for a three-hour southbound commute that became a tour of the water crisis on the North China Plain.
Mr. Wang travels several times a month to Shijiazhuang, where he is chief engineer overseeing construction of three miles of the central line of the water transfer project. A light rain splattered the windshield, and he recited a Chinese proverb about the preciousness of spring showers for farmers. He also noticed one dead river after another as his S.U.V. glided over dusty, barren riverbeds: the Yongding, the Yishui, the Xia and, finally, the Hutuo. “You see all these streams with bridges, but there is no water,” he said.
A century or so ago, the North China Plain was a healthy ecosystem, scientists say. Farmers digging wells could strike water within eight feet. Streams and creeks meandered through the region. Swamps, natural springs and wetlands were common.
Today, the region, comparable in size to New Mexico, is parched. Roughly five-sixths of the wetlands have dried up, according to one study. Scientists say that most natural streams or creeks have disappeared. Several rivers that once were navigable are now mostly dust and brush. The largest natural freshwater lake in northern China, Lake Baiyangdian, is steadily contracting and besieged with pollution.
What happened? The list includes misguided policies, unintended consequences, a population explosion, climate change and, most of all, relentless economic growth. In 1963, a flood paralyzed the region, prompting Mao to construct a flood-control system of dams, reservoirs and concrete spillways. Flood control improved but the ecological balance was altered as the dams began choking off rivers that once flowed eastward into the North China Plain.
The new reservoirs gradually became major water suppliers for growing cities like Shijiazhuang. Farmers, the region’s biggest water users, began depending almost exclusively on wells. Rainfall steadily declined in what some scientists now believe is a consequence of climate change.
Before, farmers had compensated for the region’s limited annual rainfall by planting only three crops every two years. But underground water seemed limitless and government policies pushed for higher production, so farmers began planting a second annual crop, usually winter wheat, which requires a lot of water.
By the 1970s, studies show, the water table was already falling. Then Mao’s death and the introduction of market-driven economic reforms spurred a farming renaissance. Production soared, and rural incomes rose. The water table kept falling, further drying out wetlands and rivers.
Around 1900, Shijiazhuang was a collection of farming villages. By 1950, the population had reached 335,000. This year, the city has roughly 2.3 million people with a metropolitan area population of 9 million.
More people meant more demand for water, and the city now heavily pumps groundwater. The water table is falling more than a meter a year. Today, some city wells must descend more than 600 feet to reach clean water. In the deepest drilling areas, steep downward funnels have formed in the water table that are known as “cones of depression.”
Groundwater quality also has worsened. Wastewater, often untreated, is now routinely dumped into rivers and open channels. Mr. Zheng, the water specialist, said studies showed that roughly three-quarters of the region’s entire aquifer system was now suffering some level of contamination.
“There will be no sustainable development in the future if there is no groundwater supply,” said Liu Changming, a leading Chinese hydrology expert and a senior scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A National Project
Three decades ago, when Deng Xiaoping shifted China from Maoist ideology and fixated the country on economic growth, a generation of technocrats gradually took power and began rebuilding a country that ideology had almost destroyed. Today, the top leaders of the Communist Party — including Hu Jintao, China’s president and party chief — were trained as engineers.
Though not members of the political elite, Wang Baosheng, the engineer on the water transfer project, and his colleague Yang Guangjie are of the same background. This spring, at the site outside Shijiazhuang, bulldozers clawed at a V-shaped cut in the dirt while teams of workers in blue jumpsuits and orange hard hats smoothed wet cement over a channel that will be almost as wide as a football field.
“I’ve been to the Hoover Dam, and I really admire the people who built that,” said Mr. Yang, the project manager. “At the time, they were making a huge contribution to the development of their country.”
He compared China’s transfer project to the water diversion system devised for southern California in the last century. “Maybe we are like America in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “We’re building the country.”
China’s disadvantage, compared with the United States, is that it has a smaller water supply yet almost five times as many people. China has about 7 percent of the world’s water resources and roughly 20 percent of its population. It also has a severe regional water imbalance, with about four-fifths of the water supply in the south.
Mao’s vision of borrowing water from the Yangtze for the north had an almost profound simplicity, but engineers and scientists spent decades debating the project before the government approved it, partly out of desperation, in 2002. Today, demand is far greater in the north, and water quality has badly deteriorated in the south. Roughly 41 percent of China’s wastewater is now dumped in the Yangtze, raising concerns that siphoning away clean water northward will exacerbate pollution problems in the south.
The upper reaches of the central line are expected to be finished in time to provide water to Beijing for the Olympic Games next year. Mr. Evans, the World Bank consultant, called the complete project “essential” but added that success would depend on avoiding waste and efficiently distributing the water.
Mr. Liu, the scholar and hydrologist, said that farming would get none of the new water and that cities and industry must quickly improve wastewater treatment. Otherwise, he said, cities will use the new water to dump more polluted wastewater. Shijiazhuang now dumps untreated wastewater into a canal that local farmers use to irrigate fields.
For years, Chinese officials thought irrigation efficiency was the answer for reversing groundwater declines. Eloise Kendy, a hydrology expert with The Nature Conservancy who has studied the North China Plain, said that farmers had made improvements but that the water table had kept sinking. Ms. Kendy said the spilled water previously considered “wasted” had actually soaked into the soil and recharged the aquifer. Efficiency erased that recharge. Farmers also used efficiency gains to irrigate more land.
Ms. Kendy said scientists had discovered that the water table was dropping because of water lost by evaporation and transpiration from the soil, plants and leaves. This lost water is a major reason the water table keeps dropping, scientists say.
Farmers have no choice. They drill deeper.
Difficult Choices Ahead
For many people living in the North China Plain, the notion of a water crisis seems distant. No one is crawling across a parched desert in search of an oasis. But every year, the water table keeps dropping. Nationally, groundwater usage has almost doubled since 1970 and now accounts for one-fifth of the country’s total water usage, according to the China Geological Survey Bureau.
The Communist Party is fully aware of the problems. A new water pollution law is under consideration that would sharply increase fines against polluters. Different coastal cities are building desalination plants. Multinational waste treatment companies are being recruited to help tackle the enormous wastewater problem.
Many scientists believe that huge gains can still be reaped by better efficiency and conservation. In north China, pilot projects are under way to try to reduce water loss from winter wheat crops. Some cities have raised the price of water to promote conservation, but it remains subsidized in most places. Already, some cities along the route of the transfer project are recoiling because of the planned higher prices. Some say they may just continue pumping.
Tough political choices, though, seem unavoidable. Studies by different scientists have concluded that the rising water demands in the North China Plain make it unfeasible for farmers to continue planting a winter crop. The international ramifications would be significant if China became an ever bigger customer on world grain markets. Some analysts have long warned that grain prices could steadily rise, contributing to inflation and making it harder for other developing countries to buy food.
The social implications would also be significant inside China. Near Shijiazhuang, Wang Jingyan’s farming village depends on wells that are more than 600 feet deep. Not planting winter wheat would amount to economic suicide.
“We would lose 60 percent or 70 percent of our income if we didn’t plant winter wheat,” Mr. Wang said. “Everyone here plants winter wheat.”
Another water proposal is also radical: huge, rapid urbanization. Scientists say converting farmland into urban areas would save enough water to stop the drop in the water table, if not reverse it, because widespread farming still uses more water than urban areas. Of course, large-scale urbanization, already under way, could worsen air quality; Shijiazhuang’s air already ranks among the worst in China because of heavy industrial pollution.
For now, Shijiazhuang’s priority, like that of other major Chinese cities, is to grow as quickly as possible. The city’s gross domestic product has risen by an average of 10 percent every year since 1980, even as the city’s per capita rate of available water is now only one thirty-third of the world average.
“We have a water shortage, but we have to develop,” said Wang Yongli, a senior engineer with the city’s water conservation bureau. “And development is going to be put first.”
Mr. Wang has spent four decades charting the steady extinction of the North China Plain’s aquifer. Water in Shijiazhuang, with more than 800 illegal wells, is as scarce as it is in Israel, he said. “In Israel, people regard water as more important than life itself,” he said. “In Shijiazhuang, it’s not that way. People are focused on the economy.”
Jake Hooker contributed reporting from north China. Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Beijing.
China Water: August 13, 2008: Olympic water self sufficient.
This is an interesting article, although I do not agree with the general thrust of its conclusions. For one thing although it speaks of strict licensing required to use groundwater, it ignores the common practice of illegal well drilling in China. Also if the water usage rates are going down, my guess it has to do with reducing leakage in pipes.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/13/content_9282477.htm
Olympic water self sufficient, no deep aquifer water involved
www.chinaview.cn 2008-08-13 23:57:51 Print
BEIJING, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- A Ministry of Water Resources official said on Wednesday that Beijing could ensure a sufficient supply of water for the Olympic Games, with all water coming from the capital itself, no deep underground water being involved.
Vice Minister of Water Resources Hu Siyi told a news conference that the hosting of the Games did not pose any threat to Beijing's supply of water. "There is no Olympic water diverted from the neighboring Hebei Province, and the valuable deep underground water is not used."
Hu's statement was in response to a journalist's question about the concern that in order to ensure the success of the Games, the capital's neighboring provinces had to divert water to Beijing.
Gao Erkun, the ministry's water resource department director, said China boasted a strict management system over the use of water, and license was needed to use deep aquifer water.
"Up to now, Beijing has not been permitted to exploiting the deep underground water," said Gao who also added the city "has no plan to introduce Hebei's water for the Games."
He said both Beijing and Hebei belong to the Haihe River drainage area, and Beijing was located at the downstream of some Hebei cities. "In the use of water, the capital and its neighbor are reasonable and fair."
Vice Minister Hu said the deep underground water was important strategic storage and was "generally not to be exploited". The Olympic water should first come from surface water, and then from reservoirs, he said. "If shortages still existed, shallow underground water would be used as complementary resources because its storage could be constantly refreshed by rainfall."
The supply of shallow underground water in Beijing was "relatively stable", with an annual amount of about 2.4 billion cubic meters, Hu said.
He said the capital adopted a series of measures to guarantee Olympic water storage such as strong official support for water saving.
Statistics show the city consumed 4.04 billion cubic meters of water in 2000 and the figure fell to 3.4 billion cubic meters in 2006. The amount of water consumed by every 10,000 yuan (1,428 U.S. dollars) of GDP in 2006 was cut by a half from 2002. The sewage treated was up from 43 percent of total sewage to 70 percent during those four years.
Hu said the city's two major reservoirs -- Miyun and Guanting's total water storage surpassed 1.1 billion cubic meters, with 660 million ready to use.
"There is still some surplus as Beijing introduces about 600 million cubic meters of water from the two reservoirs annually," He said.
The gross water storage in China amounts to 2.8 trillion cubic meters, ranking the sixth in the world, but the per capita amount is only a quarter of the world average.
Editor: Xinhuanet
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/13/content_9282477.htm
Olympic water self sufficient, no deep aquifer water involved
www.chinaview.cn 2008-08-13 23:57:51 Print
BEIJING, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- A Ministry of Water Resources official said on Wednesday that Beijing could ensure a sufficient supply of water for the Olympic Games, with all water coming from the capital itself, no deep underground water being involved.
Vice Minister of Water Resources Hu Siyi told a news conference that the hosting of the Games did not pose any threat to Beijing's supply of water. "There is no Olympic water diverted from the neighboring Hebei Province, and the valuable deep underground water is not used."
Hu's statement was in response to a journalist's question about the concern that in order to ensure the success of the Games, the capital's neighboring provinces had to divert water to Beijing.
Gao Erkun, the ministry's water resource department director, said China boasted a strict management system over the use of water, and license was needed to use deep aquifer water.
"Up to now, Beijing has not been permitted to exploiting the deep underground water," said Gao who also added the city "has no plan to introduce Hebei's water for the Games."
He said both Beijing and Hebei belong to the Haihe River drainage area, and Beijing was located at the downstream of some Hebei cities. "In the use of water, the capital and its neighbor are reasonable and fair."
Vice Minister Hu said the deep underground water was important strategic storage and was "generally not to be exploited". The Olympic water should first come from surface water, and then from reservoirs, he said. "If shortages still existed, shallow underground water would be used as complementary resources because its storage could be constantly refreshed by rainfall."
The supply of shallow underground water in Beijing was "relatively stable", with an annual amount of about 2.4 billion cubic meters, Hu said.
He said the capital adopted a series of measures to guarantee Olympic water storage such as strong official support for water saving.
Statistics show the city consumed 4.04 billion cubic meters of water in 2000 and the figure fell to 3.4 billion cubic meters in 2006. The amount of water consumed by every 10,000 yuan (1,428 U.S. dollars) of GDP in 2006 was cut by a half from 2002. The sewage treated was up from 43 percent of total sewage to 70 percent during those four years.
Hu said the city's two major reservoirs -- Miyun and Guanting's total water storage surpassed 1.1 billion cubic meters, with 660 million ready to use.
"There is still some surplus as Beijing introduces about 600 million cubic meters of water from the two reservoirs annually," He said.
The gross water storage in China amounts to 2.8 trillion cubic meters, ranking the sixth in the world, but the per capita amount is only a quarter of the world average.
Editor: Xinhuanet
Personal update, aquifers, etc.
I've decided this week to add to the blog but to do by adding a few articles, mostly from the last week, which deal with the depletion of ground water in China. This is a sign of impending serious problems. Although there are ways to replenish ground water artificially, to do so not only requires a source of water but also requires that the water be clean in order to prevent contamination of the aquifer. (There are many sources of this information on the web, including wikipedia. One might search under "water harvesting." One that I found informative was http://www.rainwaterharvesting.org/index.htm .
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Vietnam Water: August 9, 2008: Floods in northern Vietnam devestate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7551529.stm
BBC NEWS
Dozens killed in Vietnam floods
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
People struggle in the flooded terrain
At least 62 people in northern Vietnam have been killed by flash floods and landslides caused by a tropical storm.
Dozens of people are missing and entire villages have been cut off in Lao Cai, the worst-affected province.
A rescue effort led by the army is under way but is being hampered by the severe weather.
Tropical storm Kammuri, which came in from the Gulf of Tonkin and made landfall on Friday, hit China with rain and winds earlier in the week.
Officials in the mountainous province of Lao Cai, which borders China, told news agencies that tens of thousands of people had been stranded after roads were washed away.
Further landslides have been predicted, sparking fears that the death toll could rise.
Mud and water
The government said that more than 60 people were missing in several northern provinces, including Lao Cai. Hundreds of houses have been destroyed.
In Yen Bai, an official told Associated Press that some people were killed in their homes as they slept.
"The water and walls of mud came at night when everybody was sleeping," Luong Tuan Anh was quoted as saying. "They could not run to safety."
Kammuri is the ninth tropical storm of the year.
Earlier in the week, China evacuated nearly 400,000 people and called thousands of vessels back to port as the storm lashed its southern coast.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7551529.stm
Published: 2008/08/09 15:08:30 GMT
China Water: August 9, 2008: Cloudbusting for the Olympics.
A New Zealand paper reported on cloudbusting in regards to the Beijing Olympics.
I've shared on this before. See my post from June 14, 2008 for more information.
For this article, see: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10526191
World Story
Cloud-busting barrage
5:00AM Sunday August 10, 2008
By Paul Lewis
Beijing has spent an astonishing $20 billion to beautify the city and clear the air but the smog remains persistent. Photo / AP
Beijing has spent an astonishing $20 billion to beautify the city and clear the air but the smog remains persistent. Photo / AP
Olympic Games
In the hills around Beijing, an army waits. Armed with 37mm anti-aircraft guns they wait not for aircraft nor invaders. The enemy is clouds.
They are clouds carrying rain. Beijing did not want rain to spoil the opening ceremony nor other key events of the Olympics. So they shoot the clouds.
Not with artillery shells, mind. With chemicals, designed to get the clouds to drop their rain before they hit the Olympic venues, or to remain dry and pass harmlessly overhead.
Yes, China even tries to control the weather and, even though there is some scepticism about success rates, they have made a whole industry out of it, involving volunteer gunners and 40-year-old anti-aircraft artillery.
Herald on Sunday efforts to visit one of the cloud-shooting facilities were denied, but a lot is known about the Chinese programme run by the wonderfully named Weather Modification Division of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau.
The authorities allowed the name of one of the gunners to be published (but not photographed) - Zhang Geng, a 40-year-old farmer from the village of Beixing in the Fragrant Hills.
He waits for his phone to ring with news from the bureau that likely looking clouds are on the way.
Then he meets seven other members of the shooting team at his gun. Four carry the shells and rockets to the guns, two load and two fire.
They are not alone and, like everything else in China, the numbers are staggering.
Over the past five years, China has spent about $700 million on shooting clouds. With good reason.
Depending on the chemical contents of the shells Zhang and other gunners fire into the clouds, they either produce rain or persuade the clouds to retain their loads. China needs water, and lack of it can hamper economic growth.
Over the five years from 2000-05, according to state news agency Xinhua, shooting the clouds has produced 275 billion cubic yards of water - enough to fill China's huge Yellow River twice over.
So there is ample economic incentive for the cloud-shooting programme, even before factoring in the country's image as it desperately tries to show its best face during these Olympics.
There are up to 50,000 people employed in the rainmaking and rain-stopping programmes across China, and 6500 gun emplacements and 4000 rocket launchers are used nationally.
They have been successful too - China claims that rainfall has increased across the country by 10-25 per cent because of the programme.
But there is a drawback to the rain game.
Rainfall helps to clear the eye-smarting smog which blankets the city from time to time, so measures which are aimed at preventing rainfall may not help clear the airborne fug.
Beijing has spent an astonishing $20 billion to beautify the city and clear the air but the smog remains persistent - in spite of the government English language newspaper China Daily carrying a dubious story that the city's air does not pose any health risk for athletes.
China may yet introduce further emergency measures to cut air pollution during the three weeks of the Games, including taking 90 per cent of Beijing's cars off the streets at peak times, and closing more factories and building sites.
Maybe, too, people like Zhang Geng will be asked to train their guns skyward and shoot the clouds to make rain, helping to clear the smog.
Herald Marketplace
I've shared on this before. See my post from June 14, 2008 for more information.
For this article, see: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10526191
World Story
Cloud-busting barrage
5:00AM Sunday August 10, 2008
By Paul Lewis
Beijing has spent an astonishing $20 billion to beautify the city and clear the air but the smog remains persistent. Photo / AP
Beijing has spent an astonishing $20 billion to beautify the city and clear the air but the smog remains persistent. Photo / AP
Olympic Games
In the hills around Beijing, an army waits. Armed with 37mm anti-aircraft guns they wait not for aircraft nor invaders. The enemy is clouds.
They are clouds carrying rain. Beijing did not want rain to spoil the opening ceremony nor other key events of the Olympics. So they shoot the clouds.
Not with artillery shells, mind. With chemicals, designed to get the clouds to drop their rain before they hit the Olympic venues, or to remain dry and pass harmlessly overhead.
Yes, China even tries to control the weather and, even though there is some scepticism about success rates, they have made a whole industry out of it, involving volunteer gunners and 40-year-old anti-aircraft artillery.
Herald on Sunday efforts to visit one of the cloud-shooting facilities were denied, but a lot is known about the Chinese programme run by the wonderfully named Weather Modification Division of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau.
The authorities allowed the name of one of the gunners to be published (but not photographed) - Zhang Geng, a 40-year-old farmer from the village of Beixing in the Fragrant Hills.
He waits for his phone to ring with news from the bureau that likely looking clouds are on the way.
Then he meets seven other members of the shooting team at his gun. Four carry the shells and rockets to the guns, two load and two fire.
They are not alone and, like everything else in China, the numbers are staggering.
Over the past five years, China has spent about $700 million on shooting clouds. With good reason.
Depending on the chemical contents of the shells Zhang and other gunners fire into the clouds, they either produce rain or persuade the clouds to retain their loads. China needs water, and lack of it can hamper economic growth.
Over the five years from 2000-05, according to state news agency Xinhua, shooting the clouds has produced 275 billion cubic yards of water - enough to fill China's huge Yellow River twice over.
So there is ample economic incentive for the cloud-shooting programme, even before factoring in the country's image as it desperately tries to show its best face during these Olympics.
There are up to 50,000 people employed in the rainmaking and rain-stopping programmes across China, and 6500 gun emplacements and 4000 rocket launchers are used nationally.
They have been successful too - China claims that rainfall has increased across the country by 10-25 per cent because of the programme.
But there is a drawback to the rain game.
Rainfall helps to clear the eye-smarting smog which blankets the city from time to time, so measures which are aimed at preventing rainfall may not help clear the airborne fug.
Beijing has spent an astonishing $20 billion to beautify the city and clear the air but the smog remains persistent - in spite of the government English language newspaper China Daily carrying a dubious story that the city's air does not pose any health risk for athletes.
China may yet introduce further emergency measures to cut air pollution during the three weeks of the Games, including taking 90 per cent of Beijing's cars off the streets at peak times, and closing more factories and building sites.
Maybe, too, people like Zhang Geng will be asked to train their guns skyward and shoot the clouds to make rain, helping to clear the smog.
Herald Marketplace
China Water: August 9, 2008: Water diverted for Olympics.
Although this dates from February, it seems relevant today.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080228-china-water.html
National Geographic News: NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/NEWS
China Diverting Major River to "Water" Beijing Olympics
Kevin Holden Platt in Beijing, China
for National Geographic News
February 28, 2008
Landlocked Beijing has begun tapping a lattice of reservoirs, rivers, and canals across eastern China to provide plentiful water for this summer's Olympic Games.
As part of the initiative, more than 150 million cubic meters (39.6 billion gallons) of water are being diverted from the Yellow River through a network of canals stretching across three provinces to refill a lake south of the historically drought-stricken Chinese capital.
A parallel project is diverting water to the east coast resort of Qingdao, which will host the Olympic sailing competitions.
"Athletes from all over the world will come to China to join the Olympic Games [in August]," said Huang Feng, a researcher at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, which is in charge of the river's diversion.
"So Beijing is implementing its master plan to provide the very highest quality of water."
Only the Beginning
The current rerouting is just the precursor to a 60-billion-U.S.-dollar hydro-engineering project expected to see three human-carved rivers carry water from southern China to the arid north.
The water transfer project is designed to divert more than 40 billion cubic meters (10.5 trillion gallons) of water each year from China's longest river, the Yangtze, and its tributaries.
But observers say the move will likely spark bitter disputes between those losing and gaining access to a precious resource.
Sandra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In 2000 "thousands of farmers in the Yellow River Basin of eastern China clashed with police over a government plan to recapture runoff from a local reservoir for cities, industries, and other users," she noted.
What's more, about 300,000 Chinese are slated for resettlement to make room for new diversion channels.
(Watch related video about conflicts arising in villages affected by the recently completed Three Gorges Dam [November 27, 2007].)
"There is certainly potential for more disputes within China over land, water, and pollution" as the project gains momentum, Postel said.
Historical Water Woes
Bordered by the rapidly expanding Ordos and Gobi deserts, Beijing has been historically plagued by thirst (see map).
The north's Yellow River, a lifeline of Chinese civilization since Neolithic times, has become so overused that it sometimes runs dry before reaching its estuary on the east coast.
In the last 50 years a population explosion, an industrial revolution, the rapid expansion of cities, and the spread of irrigated agriculture have fueled the region's water shortages.
(Read "China's Instant Cities" in National Geographic magazine [June 2007].)
This push for economic growth has devastated China's environment and waterways. The World Health Organization estimates that polluted drinking water kills nearly a hundred thousand Chinese citizens each year.
To help bring more and better quality water into the north in time for the Olympics, the government revived plans first proposed by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1949 to crisscross China with a matrix of human-made waterways.
Yang Xiaoping, a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the project calls for three new waterways to run along the east, center, and far west of the country.
In addition to new construction, the project will incorporate sections of the imperial Grand Canal built during the Sui Dynasty, which lasted from A.D. 589 to 618.
The Grand Canal stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) between the southeastern city of Hangzhou and the North China Plain and was built to ferry rice northward from more fertile regions.
Portions of the ancient canal will be modernized and expanded as it is transformed into the world's longest aqueduct, said Huang of the Yellow River Commission.
Ultimately the canal will become part of the project's eastern route, transporting water from the Yangtze through a tunnel burrowed beneath the Yellow River and on to northern China.
The 745-mile-long (1,200-kilometer-long) central route will also be channeled underground as its passes the Yellow River toward Beijing.
Effects Downstream
But the most difficult part of the water diversion project, will likely be the western route, experts say.
This route will transfer water from the upper reaches of the Yangtze into the upper reaches of the Yellow River—a plan that depends on a series of canals and tunnels being carved along one edge of the Tibetan Plateau in western China.
James Nickum, a professor at Tokyo Jogakkan College, recently conducted a study of the diversion project for the United Nations Development Programme.
"The very expensive and technically challenging western route involves working on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—3,000 to 5,000 meters [9,800 to 16,400 feet] above sea level—and overcoming some major engineering and climatic challenges," Nickum said.
For one thing, the route would require tunnels to be chiseled through the earthquake-prone Bayankala Mountains, Nickum said.
Chen Xiqing, an expert on hydrology at Hohai University in Nanjing, said China's increasing openness—fueled by the country's Internet revolution—could also make this section problematic.
"As an environmental coalition becomes stronger in China, it is putting more pressure on the government and pushing for more citizen participation in environmental problem-solving," Chen said.
"My guess is that this western route will become more and more difficult to complete as people have more freedom to speak out on water rights, the environment, and local ecosystems."
And conflicts over China's hydro-engineering projects in Tibet could spill across borders.
Aaron Wolf, professor of geography at Oregon State University, said that "all of the countries in Asia downstream of rivers originating in Tibet are wary of China's water development plans."
Tibet's Yarlung Zangbo River becomes the Brahmaputra when it enters India, while its Lancang River feeds into the Mekong, which flows through Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
(Related photos: "8-Foot Giant Catfish Caught in Cambodia" [November 19, 2007].)
Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project, predicts that conflicts over water could ricochet across Asia.
"By 2015 nearly three billion people—40 percent of the projected world population—are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize enough water to satisfy the food, industrial, and domestic needs of their citizens," she said.
"This scarcity will translate into heightened competition for water between cities and farms, between neighboring states and provinces, and at times between nations."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080228-china-water.html
National Geographic News: NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/NEWS
China Diverting Major River to "Water" Beijing Olympics
Kevin Holden Platt in Beijing, China
for National Geographic News
February 28, 2008
Landlocked Beijing has begun tapping a lattice of reservoirs, rivers, and canals across eastern China to provide plentiful water for this summer's Olympic Games.
As part of the initiative, more than 150 million cubic meters (39.6 billion gallons) of water are being diverted from the Yellow River through a network of canals stretching across three provinces to refill a lake south of the historically drought-stricken Chinese capital.
A parallel project is diverting water to the east coast resort of Qingdao, which will host the Olympic sailing competitions.
"Athletes from all over the world will come to China to join the Olympic Games [in August]," said Huang Feng, a researcher at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, which is in charge of the river's diversion.
"So Beijing is implementing its master plan to provide the very highest quality of water."
Only the Beginning
The current rerouting is just the precursor to a 60-billion-U.S.-dollar hydro-engineering project expected to see three human-carved rivers carry water from southern China to the arid north.
The water transfer project is designed to divert more than 40 billion cubic meters (10.5 trillion gallons) of water each year from China's longest river, the Yangtze, and its tributaries.
But observers say the move will likely spark bitter disputes between those losing and gaining access to a precious resource.
Sandra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In 2000 "thousands of farmers in the Yellow River Basin of eastern China clashed with police over a government plan to recapture runoff from a local reservoir for cities, industries, and other users," she noted.
What's more, about 300,000 Chinese are slated for resettlement to make room for new diversion channels.
(Watch related video about conflicts arising in villages affected by the recently completed Three Gorges Dam [November 27, 2007].)
"There is certainly potential for more disputes within China over land, water, and pollution" as the project gains momentum, Postel said.
Historical Water Woes
Bordered by the rapidly expanding Ordos and Gobi deserts, Beijing has been historically plagued by thirst (see map).
The north's Yellow River, a lifeline of Chinese civilization since Neolithic times, has become so overused that it sometimes runs dry before reaching its estuary on the east coast.
In the last 50 years a population explosion, an industrial revolution, the rapid expansion of cities, and the spread of irrigated agriculture have fueled the region's water shortages.
(Read "China's Instant Cities" in National Geographic magazine [June 2007].)
This push for economic growth has devastated China's environment and waterways. The World Health Organization estimates that polluted drinking water kills nearly a hundred thousand Chinese citizens each year.
To help bring more and better quality water into the north in time for the Olympics, the government revived plans first proposed by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1949 to crisscross China with a matrix of human-made waterways.
Yang Xiaoping, a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the project calls for three new waterways to run along the east, center, and far west of the country.
In addition to new construction, the project will incorporate sections of the imperial Grand Canal built during the Sui Dynasty, which lasted from A.D. 589 to 618.
The Grand Canal stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) between the southeastern city of Hangzhou and the North China Plain and was built to ferry rice northward from more fertile regions.
Portions of the ancient canal will be modernized and expanded as it is transformed into the world's longest aqueduct, said Huang of the Yellow River Commission.
Ultimately the canal will become part of the project's eastern route, transporting water from the Yangtze through a tunnel burrowed beneath the Yellow River and on to northern China.
The 745-mile-long (1,200-kilometer-long) central route will also be channeled underground as its passes the Yellow River toward Beijing.
Effects Downstream
But the most difficult part of the water diversion project, will likely be the western route, experts say.
This route will transfer water from the upper reaches of the Yangtze into the upper reaches of the Yellow River—a plan that depends on a series of canals and tunnels being carved along one edge of the Tibetan Plateau in western China.
James Nickum, a professor at Tokyo Jogakkan College, recently conducted a study of the diversion project for the United Nations Development Programme.
"The very expensive and technically challenging western route involves working on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—3,000 to 5,000 meters [9,800 to 16,400 feet] above sea level—and overcoming some major engineering and climatic challenges," Nickum said.
For one thing, the route would require tunnels to be chiseled through the earthquake-prone Bayankala Mountains, Nickum said.
Chen Xiqing, an expert on hydrology at Hohai University in Nanjing, said China's increasing openness—fueled by the country's Internet revolution—could also make this section problematic.
"As an environmental coalition becomes stronger in China, it is putting more pressure on the government and pushing for more citizen participation in environmental problem-solving," Chen said.
"My guess is that this western route will become more and more difficult to complete as people have more freedom to speak out on water rights, the environment, and local ecosystems."
And conflicts over China's hydro-engineering projects in Tibet could spill across borders.
Aaron Wolf, professor of geography at Oregon State University, said that "all of the countries in Asia downstream of rivers originating in Tibet are wary of China's water development plans."
Tibet's Yarlung Zangbo River becomes the Brahmaputra when it enters India, while its Lancang River feeds into the Mekong, which flows through Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
(Related photos: "8-Foot Giant Catfish Caught in Cambodia" [November 19, 2007].)
Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project, predicts that conflicts over water could ricochet across Asia.
"By 2015 nearly three billion people—40 percent of the projected world population—are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize enough water to satisfy the food, industrial, and domestic needs of their citizens," she said.
"This scarcity will translate into heightened competition for water between cities and farms, between neighboring states and provinces, and at times between nations."
Personal update, the Olympics and thoughts on the environmental future of China.
It's been a bit since I've worked on this blog. Why? I've been busy. I started a new job, and it's here in the United States. For better or worse, it has nothing to do with either China or water, but is in an organization large enough so that I may eventually move up or over to a position where I can pursue these interests. I hope so anyway, but I've got to prove myself at the position where I am at first.
First question, with all that money that is allegedly to be made doing business in China, why aren't I over there right now, enjoying the Olympics?
Three quick answers, 1) the pollution makes me sick. To clarify, I don't mean that in the sense of morally outraged, I mean that it makes me feel physically bad and does things to my body that I don't like and that make exercise problematic, 2) ethics of working in business in a nation that is exploiting its workers, denying them rights and simultaneously taking jobs from nations with higher standards of not just living, but also workers rights and pollution controls, and 3) my age. (I am not as young as I used to be and would like to achieve some financial stability and security instead of continuously risking my health and future on quixotic endeavors, both here and abroad.) Therefore, I am now gainfully employed in the United States, in a job that does not terribly excite me but has great potential for the future.
So what's going to happen to China water blog?
First, as always, please feel free to contact me. Quite frankly, I'd value some feedback and attention.
Secondly, I intend to continue pursuing the topic, only there's no way that I will do so daily as I have in the past. Also, I hope to explore some aspects of water and water in China more in-depth than I have in the past. Hopefully this will result in higher quality reporting, but it will also reduce the quantity of output.
Thirdly, with only so much time in a day, I expect to be pursuing other interests as well. Some of these will be China related, some will not.
Regardless, I think past posts have shown that there is a big problem waiting to happen when the world's most populous nation and fastest growing economy is running out of water, and it is.
I do think the Chinese are quite aware of this problem. They have, after all, been quite concerned with water issues for over 2000 years, as evidence by a long history of civil engineering involving both canals and irrigation. Furthermore, Hu Jintao has a background in water issues himself, as do a surprising number of Chinese government officials.
The problem with addressing China's water and pollution problems though, lies in China's unique situation. As we can see from the now on-going olympics, China is under a great deal of tension. These Olympics have been marked by more protests, both violent and non-violent, and human rights issues than any that I can recall.
Gee! Just think, they place the Olympics in a nation with a long history of human rights abuses and then, gosh! --for some reason people start complaining about human rights abuses! Who ever would have figured? (And somehow the sight of thousands upon thousands of people marching and dancing in synchronized faux-cheerfulness did not quite still my concerns any. Gabrielle D'Annunzio would have loved it though.)
Of course, the list of human rights problems in China is long.
The Tibetan protests both at home and abroad were widely reported.
Not so widely reported were the struggles and violence from the Uighurs, China's largest Muslim minority in Xinjiang to the north of Tibet.
(see, here, or here or here for one incident. See here for another.)
For background and a summary of the Uighur situation see from Human Rights Watch see here. For the Amnesty International Version go here . For the Council on Foreign Relations report, go here .
Which is not to mention, Falun Gong, the religious group that has been involved in protesting the Beijing Olympics, also for human rights abuses, and, quite frankly, I'm sure if I were to scour around I could find more issues and more links involving China's intolerable human rights abuses. (i.e. Several of the minorities in Yunnan complain of mistreatment and repression, the Chinese Catholics are not allowed contact with the Vatican and missionary activities, union organization, environmentalist protests are all restricted and often punished in a heavy handed, repressive manner that would not be tolerated in the West.)
Why?
Simply because you have the largest population of any nation in the world, crammed into a tiny space (remember most Chinese live in a relatively restricted area of China simply because those are the only areas where one can grow food and get water. Few live in areas like Tibet or Xinjiang where resources are more scarce and population density must be considerably less.) In this tiny space, resources are stretched and distribution is also stretched. Should widespread civil unrest occur, millions will die from both starvation and violence.
The Chinese government is an atavism, a Communist relic that has gained legitimacy by encouraging its citizens to engage in Capitalism. As long as the appearance of wealth and the appearance of increase of wealth continues then the citizens will allow the government to rule. The Chinese, after all and as evidenced by much of SE Asian history, are among the most business-minded peoples in the world.
However, should the wealth appear to stop coming, then problems will occur. Citizens will see no reason at all to tolerate this government. They will agitate. Social unrest will occur.
Should the social unrest become large enough, millions will die from both violence and shortages.
Therefore, if the government of China should take a firm hand on the issue of pollution and water issues, and restrict businesses overly much because of it, then the profits, at least in the short term, will decline.
Then the government of China will lose support, because its primary support now rests on its alleged economic successes. The degree of loss of support cannot be predicted but its probably safe to say that the more important people who feel their wealth is imperiled then the less support the government will have.
Should the government of China of lose sufficient support, civil unrest will occur and, guess what, millions will die from violence and food shortages.
Therefore the government of China, for several reasons, will continue to both encourage acquisition of wealth, often to the detriment of environmental interests, and keep a handle on social unrests as well as the groups that, rightly or wrongly, promote social unrest.
Why? Because there's just too many people living in too small a space, trying to use too little stuff.
Is there a solution to this conundrum? Maybe, the Chinese are, after all, trying to get as much control as possible over overseas resources, particularly in Africa. Then again, with rising fuel and shipping costs, it's going to become increasingly difficult to get all this stuff back to China (which is not to mention that this proposed solution might not be in the best interests of the African people.)
First question, with all that money that is allegedly to be made doing business in China, why aren't I over there right now, enjoying the Olympics?
Three quick answers, 1) the pollution makes me sick. To clarify, I don't mean that in the sense of morally outraged, I mean that it makes me feel physically bad and does things to my body that I don't like and that make exercise problematic, 2) ethics of working in business in a nation that is exploiting its workers, denying them rights and simultaneously taking jobs from nations with higher standards of not just living, but also workers rights and pollution controls, and 3) my age. (I am not as young as I used to be and would like to achieve some financial stability and security instead of continuously risking my health and future on quixotic endeavors, both here and abroad.) Therefore, I am now gainfully employed in the United States, in a job that does not terribly excite me but has great potential for the future.
So what's going to happen to China water blog?
First, as always, please feel free to contact me. Quite frankly, I'd value some feedback and attention.
Secondly, I intend to continue pursuing the topic, only there's no way that I will do so daily as I have in the past. Also, I hope to explore some aspects of water and water in China more in-depth than I have in the past. Hopefully this will result in higher quality reporting, but it will also reduce the quantity of output.
Thirdly, with only so much time in a day, I expect to be pursuing other interests as well. Some of these will be China related, some will not.
Regardless, I think past posts have shown that there is a big problem waiting to happen when the world's most populous nation and fastest growing economy is running out of water, and it is.
I do think the Chinese are quite aware of this problem. They have, after all, been quite concerned with water issues for over 2000 years, as evidence by a long history of civil engineering involving both canals and irrigation. Furthermore, Hu Jintao has a background in water issues himself, as do a surprising number of Chinese government officials.
The problem with addressing China's water and pollution problems though, lies in China's unique situation. As we can see from the now on-going olympics, China is under a great deal of tension. These Olympics have been marked by more protests, both violent and non-violent, and human rights issues than any that I can recall.
Gee! Just think, they place the Olympics in a nation with a long history of human rights abuses and then, gosh! --for some reason people start complaining about human rights abuses! Who ever would have figured? (And somehow the sight of thousands upon thousands of people marching and dancing in synchronized faux-cheerfulness did not quite still my concerns any. Gabrielle D'Annunzio would have loved it though.)
Of course, the list of human rights problems in China is long.
The Tibetan protests both at home and abroad were widely reported.
Not so widely reported were the struggles and violence from the Uighurs, China's largest Muslim minority in Xinjiang to the north of Tibet.
(see, here, or here or here for one incident. See here for another.)
For background and a summary of the Uighur situation see from Human Rights Watch see here. For the Amnesty International Version go here . For the Council on Foreign Relations report, go here .
Which is not to mention, Falun Gong, the religious group that has been involved in protesting the Beijing Olympics, also for human rights abuses, and, quite frankly, I'm sure if I were to scour around I could find more issues and more links involving China's intolerable human rights abuses. (i.e. Several of the minorities in Yunnan complain of mistreatment and repression, the Chinese Catholics are not allowed contact with the Vatican and missionary activities, union organization, environmentalist protests are all restricted and often punished in a heavy handed, repressive manner that would not be tolerated in the West.)
Why?
Simply because you have the largest population of any nation in the world, crammed into a tiny space (remember most Chinese live in a relatively restricted area of China simply because those are the only areas where one can grow food and get water. Few live in areas like Tibet or Xinjiang where resources are more scarce and population density must be considerably less.) In this tiny space, resources are stretched and distribution is also stretched. Should widespread civil unrest occur, millions will die from both starvation and violence.
The Chinese government is an atavism, a Communist relic that has gained legitimacy by encouraging its citizens to engage in Capitalism. As long as the appearance of wealth and the appearance of increase of wealth continues then the citizens will allow the government to rule. The Chinese, after all and as evidenced by much of SE Asian history, are among the most business-minded peoples in the world.
However, should the wealth appear to stop coming, then problems will occur. Citizens will see no reason at all to tolerate this government. They will agitate. Social unrest will occur.
Should the social unrest become large enough, millions will die from both violence and shortages.
Therefore, if the government of China should take a firm hand on the issue of pollution and water issues, and restrict businesses overly much because of it, then the profits, at least in the short term, will decline.
Then the government of China will lose support, because its primary support now rests on its alleged economic successes. The degree of loss of support cannot be predicted but its probably safe to say that the more important people who feel their wealth is imperiled then the less support the government will have.
Should the government of China of lose sufficient support, civil unrest will occur and, guess what, millions will die from violence and food shortages.
Therefore the government of China, for several reasons, will continue to both encourage acquisition of wealth, often to the detriment of environmental interests, and keep a handle on social unrests as well as the groups that, rightly or wrongly, promote social unrest.
Why? Because there's just too many people living in too small a space, trying to use too little stuff.
Is there a solution to this conundrum? Maybe, the Chinese are, after all, trying to get as much control as possible over overseas resources, particularly in Africa. Then again, with rising fuel and shipping costs, it's going to become increasingly difficult to get all this stuff back to China (which is not to mention that this proposed solution might not be in the best interests of the African people.)
China Water: August 9, 2008: National Geographic Magazine says Chinese air pollution worst in the world.
It's been a bit since I've worked on this blog. Why? I've been busy. I started a new job, and it's here in the
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070709-china-pollution_2.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070709-china-pollution_2.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070709-china-pollution_2.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070709-china-pollution_2.html
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Chinese pollution map
This comes from the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs.
http://www.ipe.org.cn/english/
It's interactive and very interesting although large portions are only in Chinese.
http://www.ipe.org.cn/english/
It's interactive and very interesting although large portions are only in Chinese.
China Water: August 3, 2008: Academic exchange between Nanjing and Nebraska about water.
It seems like not too long ago, that I shared information on a similar academic exchange in Minnesota. Of course, it would make sense that such exchanges would be taking place and on a growing scale.
http://www.hpj.com/archives/2008/aug08/aug4/Watersciencefocusofcollabor.cfm?title=Water%20science%20focus%20of%20collaboration%20between%20UNL,%20Chinese%20university
Water science focus of collaboration between UNL, Chinese university
Nebraska
With its focus on water science and engineering, Hohai University in Nanjing, China, is a natural partner institution for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, say scholars who are laying the foundation for long-term collaboration.
In the past year, UNL and Hohai researchers in computer science, water, and public policy have visited each others' campuses, with seed funds from the National Science Foundation in the United States, and its Chinese equivalent, the National Natural Science Foundation of China. A UNL delegation went to Nanjing in April for a two-week workshop, after hosting a team from Hohai in October.
According to the project report, by 2025, as much as two-thirds of the world's population may face water shortages, which can lead to economic crises, disease, famine, and death, if people don't take action in time. Policy changes and water management will need to be informed by monitoring and early warning systems that track and model water usage and availability.
"Our long-term goal is to develop a cyber-infrastructure for global water research," said Ashok Samal, a computer scientist at UNL who is one of the principal investigators of the NSF-funded project, "US/China Digital Government Collaboration: Building a Collaboratory in Hydroinformatics and Water Policy."
"The U.S. and China, being two of the world leaders as well as being two of the largest consumers of water, should play leading roles in this endeavor," Samal said. "Hohai has huge breadth. It's a full-service water university." Many of China's leading civil engineers and water scientists, such as the team that designed and built the Three Gorges Dam, are graduates of Hohai.
Because of Hohai's unique focus on water, "UNL is a natural counterpart," said Xun-Hong Chen, professor of hydrogeology at UNL's School of Natural Resources. "Water is an area of excellence at UNL."
Chen has worked with Hohai previously and helped the UNL group forge connections. Two of the Hohai team members had been his postdoctoral students.
While in Nanjing, SNR assistant professor John Holz, who specializes in water quality, met with about 40 graduate students from Hohai University and described how to apply to UNL. The Chinese government has committed to funding a certain number of Hohai students to study in the United States each year.
"Some have already been in touch," Holz said. "This gave Hohai students an exposure to UNL and put us in a positive position for recruitment."
In addition to Samal, Chen and Holz, the UNL delegation included Donald A. Wilhite, director of the School of Natural Resources; Alan Tomkins, director of UNL's Public Policy Center; Sarah Michaels, professor in the Department of Political Science; Leen-Kiat Soh, associate professor of computer sciences; and Deepti Joshi and Peng Du, UNL graduate students in computer sciences.
Chinese representation at the workshop included many researchers and graduate students from Hohai University, as well as officials and researchers from China's Ministry of Water Resources, Bureau of Hydrology and Water Survey of Jiangsu Province and non-governmental organizations.
The goals of the April workshop were to catalog hydrological data collection methods; to summarize ground and surface water modeling methods; to discuss decision-making policies related to water resources; and to examine what computational techniques are needed for data mining and fusion.
Future partnership activities are likely to include:
--Short courses taught at Hohai by UNL and Hohai faculty, giving UNL students a chance to work at Hohai University's laboratories.
--Hohai graduate students funded mostly by the Chinese government coming to study water-related topics at UNL.
--Visiting scholars from China at UNL.
--Projects focusing on issues of water quality and water supply.
--New uses of computing technology to enable citizens, scientists and policy makers to incorporate the best available information into decision making.
Samal envisioned applying what are now cutting-edge uses of Web technology, such as "volunteer geographic information computing," in which people all over the world can add data and information to a central database on water.
It could also incorporate information about water, going back several hundred years. The question, Samal said, is, "How do we combine information of different qualities, resolutions, and time periods, to answer some interesting questions?"
7/14/08
4 Star NE\5-B
Date: 7/31/08
http://www.hpj.com/archives/2008/aug08/aug4/Watersciencefocusofcollabor.cfm?title=Water%20science%20focus%20of%20collaboration%20between%20UNL,%20Chinese%20university
Water science focus of collaboration between UNL, Chinese university
Nebraska
With its focus on water science and engineering, Hohai University in Nanjing, China, is a natural partner institution for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, say scholars who are laying the foundation for long-term collaboration.
In the past year, UNL and Hohai researchers in computer science, water, and public policy have visited each others' campuses, with seed funds from the National Science Foundation in the United States, and its Chinese equivalent, the National Natural Science Foundation of China. A UNL delegation went to Nanjing in April for a two-week workshop, after hosting a team from Hohai in October.
According to the project report, by 2025, as much as two-thirds of the world's population may face water shortages, which can lead to economic crises, disease, famine, and death, if people don't take action in time. Policy changes and water management will need to be informed by monitoring and early warning systems that track and model water usage and availability.
"Our long-term goal is to develop a cyber-infrastructure for global water research," said Ashok Samal, a computer scientist at UNL who is one of the principal investigators of the NSF-funded project, "US/China Digital Government Collaboration: Building a Collaboratory in Hydroinformatics and Water Policy."
"The U.S. and China, being two of the world leaders as well as being two of the largest consumers of water, should play leading roles in this endeavor," Samal said. "Hohai has huge breadth. It's a full-service water university." Many of China's leading civil engineers and water scientists, such as the team that designed and built the Three Gorges Dam, are graduates of Hohai.
Because of Hohai's unique focus on water, "UNL is a natural counterpart," said Xun-Hong Chen, professor of hydrogeology at UNL's School of Natural Resources. "Water is an area of excellence at UNL."
Chen has worked with Hohai previously and helped the UNL group forge connections. Two of the Hohai team members had been his postdoctoral students.
While in Nanjing, SNR assistant professor John Holz, who specializes in water quality, met with about 40 graduate students from Hohai University and described how to apply to UNL. The Chinese government has committed to funding a certain number of Hohai students to study in the United States each year.
"Some have already been in touch," Holz said. "This gave Hohai students an exposure to UNL and put us in a positive position for recruitment."
In addition to Samal, Chen and Holz, the UNL delegation included Donald A. Wilhite, director of the School of Natural Resources; Alan Tomkins, director of UNL's Public Policy Center; Sarah Michaels, professor in the Department of Political Science; Leen-Kiat Soh, associate professor of computer sciences; and Deepti Joshi and Peng Du, UNL graduate students in computer sciences.
Chinese representation at the workshop included many researchers and graduate students from Hohai University, as well as officials and researchers from China's Ministry of Water Resources, Bureau of Hydrology and Water Survey of Jiangsu Province and non-governmental organizations.
The goals of the April workshop were to catalog hydrological data collection methods; to summarize ground and surface water modeling methods; to discuss decision-making policies related to water resources; and to examine what computational techniques are needed for data mining and fusion.
Future partnership activities are likely to include:
--Short courses taught at Hohai by UNL and Hohai faculty, giving UNL students a chance to work at Hohai University's laboratories.
--Hohai graduate students funded mostly by the Chinese government coming to study water-related topics at UNL.
--Visiting scholars from China at UNL.
--Projects focusing on issues of water quality and water supply.
--New uses of computing technology to enable citizens, scientists and policy makers to incorporate the best available information into decision making.
Samal envisioned applying what are now cutting-edge uses of Web technology, such as "volunteer geographic information computing," in which people all over the world can add data and information to a central database on water.
It could also incorporate information about water, going back several hundred years. The question, Samal said, is, "How do we combine information of different qualities, resolutions, and time periods, to answer some interesting questions?"
7/14/08
4 Star NE\5-B
Date: 7/31/08
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