The Problem: an Introduction

Hello and welcome to my blog!

Have you ever wondered how a country with over 1.3 billion inhabitants manages to meet water demands of its people?....

Me too! This will be the topic of my blog; over the next few months I will be investigating some of the ways that the Chinese government and other NGO’s are addressing the water shortage. I will be assessing the use of new geoengineering techniques as well as new political policies and practices and what this means for the future of Chinas water security and consequently food security. This assessment will take place through the mediums of books, videos, newspaper articles and academic readings that I find relevant and most importantly interesting. I hope you find this blog to be engaging and informative and I look to reading your comments over the coming months.

Other than just introducing my blog and its aims I wanted to use this first post to outline some of the biggest issues that China faces in its struggle for water security. Quite clearly Chinas mammoth population of over 1.3 billion is a cause for concern. Figure 1 shows the relationship between population and water withdrawals, we can see how the use of water has increased with population and when population peaks as expected in 2030 then the annual per capita renewable freshwater availability will fall to 1760m³, this is just 4% higher than the water stress limit suggested by Falkenmark and Widstrand (1992). The stresses on freshwater supply will be further exacerbated by the rapid economic growth, improved standard of living and increased urbanisation that China is experiencing. 

Figure 1: Chinas water (a) total supply by source from 1997 to 2006; (b) trends in total withdrawal by use categories and population starting in 1980 and projected up to 2030

Source: (Cheng et al, 2009)

China also suffers from a common issue of having its water resources located in the “wrong” place and “wrong” time (Cheng et al,2009). There is a spatial and temporal mismatch in the way its water resources are diffused throughout the country. The Northern Chinese provinces as defined by the boundaries of the Yellow, Huai and Hai rivers, contribute significantly to industrial output and GDP and they are home to a third of China’s population, yet only have access to 7.7% of China’s total water resources (Cheng et al, 2009). The Southwest on the other hand receives 21.3% of China’s water while contributing only 0.7% toward GDP, this is in part due to the fact that the northwest receives <50mm of rainfall a year, a considerably small figure especially when compared to the costal regions of the southeast that receive >1600mm a year (Cheng et al, 2009). The Monsoon climate does not help as having the majority of your fresh rainwater fall in the summer makes collecting and utilising it extremely challenging, it also makes China prone to flooding and results in periods of drought.

China’s rapid economic growth and the resulting waste and pollution this generates has only served to compound issues of water scarcity. A great deal of Chinas ground and surface-waters have been polluted as industrial waste and agricultural byproducts as well as municipal waste find there way into rivers and lakes. The statistics are particularly damning as it is estimated that 40% of China’s surface water is fit only for industrial and agricultural use and only half of the country’s major cities meet the standard for drinking water (Gleick, 2013).

These are just some of the challenges China faces in its battle for water security and over the coming months I will begin to assess they’re responses on all political, practical and technological fronts.