Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Dams, Rivers, Lakes

Monday's Environmental Issues in China class was all about water. I think the most interesting thing we learned was how cities in China price and distribute water. (On a personal note, I'm about to receive my first-ever Chinese utility bill! I need to learn some appropriate Chinese expressions to use when I'm grumbling over the high cost of utilities, along the lines of "these fees are breaking my balls".)

I want to write down some of the basics of Chinese water issues, but before I do I also have to make a correction to my previous blog post about the water quality ranking system. Our teacher told us she made a mistake when she was telling us how differently-ranked water can be used. Grade V quality water (most polluted) can't really be used for anything, and Grade III quality water (medium-level pollution) can be used for agricultural irrigation (not Grade V, like I wrote before). Industry, depending on what kind, can use Grade II, III, or IV quality water.

Moving on...China has a lot of water resources, but a fairly low per capita water capacity, that is decreasing. This is due, of course, to the high population. Plus the concentration of the population in massive urban areas (megacities!) presents a Herculean set of transportation/distribution/treatment challenges. Shortages abound--basic water resource shortages, shortages caused by pollution, and shortages caused by underdeveloped infrastructure. I really couldn't explain the water scarcity issue better than this article.

Some info about the Yellow River:
  •  The Yellow River is China's "mother river," but her little flooding problem (one 19th century flood killed possibly as many as 4,000,000 people) makes her a very, very unstable mother, something like a tiger with bipolar disorder.
  • It flows through a semi-arid area, and is one of the most over-exploited and polluted rivers of all time.*
  • In the 1950s, only 19% of the river was being exploited. In the 1980s it was 69%. In 2009 that number rose to 79%.
*English usage side note, can something be "moderately exploited"? Or "a bit exploited"? Why then do we have to say "over-exploited" to really get the meaning across? And is "Ecosploitation" a possible new film genre?

Some info about dams on Chinese rivers:
  • As of 2003 the rivers in China had 22,000 dams, a little less than half the number of dams in the whole world. At that time the other many-dammed nations were the U.S., with 6,575; India, with 4,291; and Japan, with 2,675. Western European countries and South Africa also have a fair amount of dams, for their size. Russia only had 99, which is surprising to me, considering the soviet legacy of large-scale engineering projects. 
  • In Sichuan, the province where I live, every river has 10 or more dams on it.
  • There is a lot of competition between state-owned electric companies to "take what they can, while they can," according to my professor, which is why there is such a ridiculously high number of dams.
A fact about bottled water in China:
  • In 2004 the per capital bottled water consumption was 9 liters. (The US was 91, and Italy was the highest at 184--mio dio!) 
The Chinese number seems pretty low, right? Bottled water is pretty ubiquitous here, including the large office-water-cooler style jugs that a lot of people buy for home consumption. The jugs are returned to the distributor for reuse, so they're not exactly like the personal-size bottles of water that can be bought at any convenience store, so I wonder if they're being included in the statistics. 

Some important environmental events that have focused public attention on water issues (with links):
  • 1994, Three Gorges Dam project begins.
  • November 2005, Songhua River 松花江, an explosion at a petrochemical plant dumps benzene into the river.
  • June 2007,  Tai Lake 太湖, eutrophication due to chemical dumping turned the lake into Nickelodeon-quality green slime. Because the lake is bordered by four provinces, the different governments had to create a framework for cooperation across provincial lines. China is currently revising its system for managing rivers and large bodies of water that pass through multiple provinces.
  • August 2010, Bailong River 白龙江, mudslide, most likely due to intensive hydropower development. Or Dam! We built too many.
  • Ongoing, Dian Lake 滇池, massive pollution.
 If there's anyone out there that loooves reading World Bank reports, here's one called "Water Pollution Emergencies in China" from 2007.

I have a lot more to write about on the topic of water, but it will have to wait until tomorrow, because my brain is powering down to conserve energy. (I'm carbon neutral, and contain no BPA or rare earth elements!) Still to come: The "nine dragons manage the water" system, Chengdu water pricing and household use (this might include a picture of my toilet, you lucky people), subsidies, and the hard lives of water activists.

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