(Cross-posts: Brudiamonia, Someone Took In These Pants..., dKos Environmentalists)
Beijing, with a metropolitan area of about 12 million, is "suffering its worst drought in 50 years," according to an article Friday in the Toronto Globe and Mail (via jillian's environmental news roundup). The drought, which has lasted seven years, spells bad news for a city with an already dangerously dwindling supply of water.
The government has already warned that Beijing residents must take urgent measures to save water or else the city will face a shortage of 1.1 billion cubic metres of water by the time of the 2008 Olympics. Beijing has promised a "Green Olympics" in 2008, but it will have to take drastic action to achieve that goal. Because of the drought, the water level in one of Beijing's main reservoirs has fallen 91 per cent below its average level.
The drought is compounded by heavy pollution, which has left more than half of the surface water in China's seven biggest rivers unfit for human consumption. Of the country's 600 biggest cities, 110 have serious shortages of drinkable water, and 320 million rural residents are also suffering water shortages. Last year, a chemical spill on the Songhua River left millions of people without water.
If surface water is not potable, cities and towns have to tap into alternative sources for water, such as underground reserves. This puts a strain on the entire country’s water supply and diminishes the underground reserves, which contain what is called “fossil water” because they are not replenished by rain nearly as quickly as water is abstracted from them. Here’s Fred Pearce’s outlook on the underground water in the North China Plain, where Beijing is located, from his new book, When the Rivers Run Dry:
The underground reserves on the North China plain are being emptied 24 million acre-feet a year faster than the rains replenish them. In the 1960s, the water table was almost at the surface; now it is 100 feet down. In places around Beijing, 90 percent of the replenishable water is gone, and here and there the city is tapping water half a mile down in fossil aquifers that will never refill. Fearing the worst, the city has banned new water-guzzling industries and even emptied the lakes in front of the Summer Palace.
I’m not sure which lakes Pearce is referring to here. It looks as if some of the lakes still get 40 million cubic meters of water every year from the Beijing water system.
The Marble Boat in Beijing's Summer Palace (Photo from airunp at Spanish Wikipedia)
The point, in any case, is that China’s second-largest city is facing a supply crisis. One would think then, that Beijing could do without artificial ski hills.
…just northeast of Beijing is the most bizarre sight of all: a massive 10-storey indoor ski resort, Qiaobo Ski Dome, which provides artificial snow on two slopes at a constant temperature of three degrees below 0 C, even in the oppressive heat of a Chinese summer.
This must be an example of one of the water-guzzling industries Pearce says are now banned (although Qiaobo is only one year old, so I wonder what the nature and effective date of the ban is – unfortunately this edition of Pearce’s book has no citations). But, as water intensive as Qiaobo is, Beijing’s slew of outdoor ski hills appear to be worse culprits, which, according to the Globe and Mail article, “need to produce a constant supply of artificial snow because Beijing's winter temperatures are not cold enough to prevent melting.”
One study estimated that the 13 outdoor ski resorts around Beijing are pumping up 3.8 million cubic metres of groundwater every year -- enough for the annual water needs of 42,000 city residents.
This represents a little less than 1 percent of Beijing’s total annual water demand, which is pretty large for just one (unnecessary) activity. The simplest thing to do would be to retire the ski hills, a water-sucking luxury provided by profit-driven engineering attempts to defy Beijing’s climate, but of course this is not what’s being done. Instead, the Chinese government (besides implementing some token water-saving measures) is trying to subvert nature to quench Beijing’s thirst.
[Globe and Mail article] …the Communist regime is seeking to bend science to its needs. Chinese air force jets have flown nearly 3,000 cloud-seeding flights in the past five years, sowing chemicals that have produced an estimated 210 billion cubic metres of rain water over a third of China's territory. Thousands of rocket launchers and cannons are also used to seed the clouds.
The cloud-seeding flights, however, are nothing compared to a proposed project to transfer massive amounts of water from the southern region of China to the northern region, which, according to Pearce, would be the world’s largest civil engineering project.
The south-to-north scheme will divert part of the flow of the Yangtze, the world’s fourth biggest river, to replenish the dried-up Yellow River and the tens of millions of people in megacities that rely on it. The price tag is $60 billion.
Pearce reports of Chinese officials’ fears that the project could turn out to be an ecological disaster. This is not surprising in a country where environmental and humanitarian crises from hydrological mega-projects are all too common. (See here and here, for example.) Giving up the ski hills will not solve all of Beijing's water problems. After all, the North China Plain is already a very heavily populated area with relatively little water per capita. But it would be a good start. And conservation is a much more viable alternative than massive water diversion strategies.
[Globe and Mail article] "Water is so precious in Beijing," a researcher who worked on the study told the China Daily. "Beijingers can afford to live without skiing, but they cannot live without water."