China's water crisis a growing threat

(Ecns.cn) – China now faces tremendous challenges as two-thirds of its cities are short of water. Overall scarcity has also resulted in a shrinking amount of arable land, posing a further threat to the country's food security.

Last week, the United Nations dedicated World Water Day to the theme of "Water and Food Security," two closely related concepts that are troubling an increasing number of regions across the world.

In China, water consumption has reached more than 600 billion cubic meters a year, but there is still a void of about 50 billion cubic meters. Currently, average per capita water resources are only 2,100 cubic meters annually, or about 28 percent of the international average, according to the Ministry of Water Resources.

With 11 Chinese provinces already below the water poverty level set by the World Bank (1,000 cubic meters a person per year), acute water scarcity is now seen as a primary urgent task for the country's future development.

Scarcer than ever

Over the past year getting clean water has been a struggle for many people in China, especially in regions plagued by severe drought such as Sichuan, Yunnan and Inner Mongolia.

Meanwhile, two-fifths of the country's rivers are seriously polluted and unfit for drinking due to the discharge of billions of tons of sewage and wastewater, according to the Ministry of Water Resources.

The latest statistics from the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters show that more than 2,177,300 hectares of farmland have been stricken by drought and that 5.85 million people are having difficulty getting drinking water.

Currently China has more than 400 cities short of water, some 110 of which are facing serious scarcity, said Jiao Yong, Vice Minister of Water Resources, at the initiation ceremony of a national water conservation activity last Thursday.

Moreover, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Gansu, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei and Ningxia all have dire water scarcity problems and fall below the World Bank's water poverty level.

Among them, Beijing is the thirstiest city, where per capita water resources fell to only 120 cubic meters per year in 2011. The city's water supply often rose above 2.884 million cubic meters per day in the past two years, very close to its maximum daily water supply capacity of 3 million cubic meters.

Pollution and waste

Several decades ago, the Wenyu River that flows from Beijing was so abundant in running water that large ships could travel down it, but gradually it turned into streams and eventually dried up along the valleys.

In most cases like this, rivers dry up not because of climate change but rather human behavior. Usually, rivers dry up before reaching urban areas, where water volume suddenly increases due to a large amount of water from drains and sewage.

Wastewater is definitely one of the biggest problems. Factories and cities continue to discharge mostly untreated sewage and pollutants into rivers and lakes, which are very difficult to clean up and inevitably pollute farmland.

According to the Ministry of Water Resources, about one-fifth of the country's rivers are so polluted that their water quality is rated Category V. China rates its water quality from Category I to Category V, with Category V being too toxic even to touch.

Apart from pollution, our lifestyles also have negative impacts on inadequate water resources. For example, many people choose bottled water even if safe drinking water is available, yet they are generally unaware that one bottle of water requires five times that amount to produce.

Moreover, subsidies to keep water prices low are also being criticized by experts, as they may lead to more cases of wasted water, while an alarming amount of the country's remaining water resources are being drained away by inefficient irrigation systems.

Tackling the crisis

Along with rapid industrialization and urbanization, the demand for water is also increasing at an unexpected speed in China.

To ease the pressure and ensure food security, the State Council, or China's cabinet, unveiled a guideline on Thursday to regulate the use of water under "the strictest criteria," capping the maximum volume of water use at 700 billion cubic meters by the end of 2030, according to Xinhua.

The government will tighten its supervision over exploitation of underground water, further protect sources of drinking water, and restore the aquatic ecological system by introducing water-use licenses and other measures.

To tackle Beijing's water crisis, the local government has been promoting a series of new irrigation techniques to maximize the utilization of water. Till 2011, the areas that have applied new techniques reached 286,000 hectares, 88 percent of the total irrigation area. In this way, the consumption of water for irrigation fell from 1.74 billion tons in 2001 to 1.09 billion tons in 2011.

Over the next 10 years, the central government has planned 4 trillion yuan (US$634.4 billion) of investment in water resource conservation projects, of which 1.8 trillion yuan will be invested during the 2011-2015 period.