China’s Water Problems Are Even Worse Than You Think: Report

Let China sleep, for when she wakes she will
shake the world, Napoleon once supposedly said.
He might also have warned: Let China sleep, for
when she wakes she will be really, really
thirsty.
A new report published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences journal says
China’s water shortage crisis is likely to deepen
as the country continues to develop.
Government efforts to try and redistribute
water from relatively water-wealthy regions to
more parched provinces are also likely to
further exacerbate the problem, the authors
say.
In an interview, co-author Dabo Guan criticized
the so-called South-North Water Transfer
Project — a $81 billion effort to re-route water
from the south to the drier north – in
particular. While the government has touted its
elaborate solution to the Chinese capital’s
rapidly falling water table, Mr. Guan said that
by 2020 the additional water infusions brought
by the project — which recently began
delivering water to Beijing — would likely
satisfy only 5% of the city’s overall demand.
“A metaphor is, if you have a cold, if you have a
temperature, antibiotics is the cure, it’s the
solution.” By contrast, the transfer project is
“like paracetamol,” a pain reliever, said Mr.
Guan, professor at the University of East Anglia.
According to the United Nations, though China
is home to 21% of the world’s population, it
contains only 7% of the world’s freshwater
supplies. Particularly in its north, the country
is deeply parched – so much so that the
government last week said it would begin
encouraging people to eat potatoes, rather than
more water-intensive traditional staples such as
rice and wheat, to try and conserve water.
Prior to the arrival of infusions from the south,
Beijing’s per-capita water volume was just 100
cubic meters, 1.25% of the world’s average level.
With the water from the south, that figure will
go up to 150 cubic meters per person, according
to state media reports.
The UN says a region is considered “water-
stressed” when annual water supplies dip below
1,700 cubic meters per person.
In addition to the physical rerouting of China’s
water flows, the report’s authors say that that
numerous water-strapped provinces end up
inadvertently exporting their own water by
producing water-intensive goods like coal and
livestock that get shipped off to other,
wealthier regions. As a consequence of these so-
called “virtual” water exports, Mr. Guan says,
water-poor provinces find their supplies even
more strained.
Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi
and Hunan provinces are the losers, accounting
for 78% of virtual water exports, the report
says. Comparatively water-rich regions like
Shanghai, Guangdong and Zhejiang rank among
the top virtual importers. Nationwide, such
virtual exports account for more than one-third
of the country’s national water supply.
To address the country’s appetite for water,
Mr. Guan advocates a greater push for more
effective use—for example, fighting leakage in
agricultural irrigation—as well as consumer
cutbacks and a shift toward less water-
intensive industries, such as the service
industry.
Still, the report’s authors sound a pessimistic
note, given the Middle Kingdom’s continuing
high rates of growth: “Improving water use
efficiency is key to mitigating water stress, but
the efficiency gains will be largely offset by the
water demand increase caused by continued
economic development,” they write.