Quenching China’s Water Thirst

December 24, 2009

By Joe Lamar

For 10-12 days every year, the sluice gates are opened so sediment can be blasted down to the estuary. Since this 'flushing operation' started in 2002, the height of the river bed has started to fall for the first time in decades, easing the threat of flooding. But it's only a temporary fix: sediment continues to build up at Xiaolangdi. Ahead of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), the Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC) said it is asking for a new hydroelectric dam a short distance upstream to share the burden of silt control.

‘Yellow River Civilisation Has Been Destroyed’

Pollution is another problem that is far from solved, although there are increasing glimmers of hope. The Yellow River is abused and overused. Last year, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that 4 billion tons of industrial waste and sewage are discharged annually into the river system, leaving 83% of the water too contaminated to drink without treatment. In 2007, the authorities revealed that a third of the 150 fish species that once swam the murky waters are now extinct and fishermen’s catches are down by 60 percent because of pollution, falling water levels and over-exploitation of the river’s resources. Tang Xiyang, one of the founders of the green movement in China, puts the trend in apocalyptic terms: ‘The Yellow River civilization has been destroyed. People cannot survive on that river anymore.’

Yet there are indications that China may have passed the peak of the Kuznets curve of dirty-to-clean growth seen during the development of Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea. In its most recent report on China, the World Bank saw signs that the country may be turning the corner on pollution. Several activists in Henan expressed similar views that the problem, although still bad, may be past its worst. That is certainly the line of officials at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, which oversees the waterway. ‘We’ve changed a bad situation into a better situation. But we can’t say it is good yet. We have a long way to go,’ said Sun Feng, Director of the YRCC Department of International Cooperation.

The big outstanding problem is one of quantity rather than quality. The Yellow’s volume is falling as demand rises. The river accounts for just 2% of the run-off in China, yet irrigates 15% of the country’s crops and sup plies water to 12% of the population. At the control centre in Zhengzhou, the allocation of water among the nine provinces it passes through are marked on another wall-sized screen. The proportion has been fixed since 1987 based on a long-term estimate of 58 billion cubic meters of run-off every year. That has proved a massive overestimate. This year, the run-off is forecast to be less than 50 billion cubic meters. In 2003, it fell below 45 billion. The provinces are supposed to share the impact of the shortfall equally. Yet Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Shandong take more than 1 billion cubic meters of water above their allocation every year without permission.

The loser is the ecosystem. Twenty-one billion cubic meters of water each year are set aside for sediment flushing and maintenance of non-human life on the river. This is the area of the water budget that is cut whenever provinces go over their limit. The Yellow River Conservancy Commission has recently conducted research that shows the value of keeping water for wildlife and nature, but they need more power to put this into action. ‘Some provinces and reservoirs don’t obey our instructions. They ignore us to generate electricity,’ says Yu. ‘The problem is we lack punitive measures.’

Dispersal of authority across agencies and provinces has not helped. To tighten administration, the central government is drafting a Yellow River Law that would give more power to the river’s administrating body. There are also plans for a ‘digital Yellow River’ that would allow bureaucrats in Zhengzhou to control and monitor sluice gates and irrigation channels remotely along the entire length of the river. Currently this is only possible in the lower reaches.