Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future Is Drying Up. By Jim Yardley, The New York Times, September 28, 2007. “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… 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… Around 1900, Shijiazhuang [a provincial capital in the North China Plain] 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’… ‘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’.”