In Queshan County, in the plains of central China, fields that are usually green with maize plants are brown and dusty. It has rained very little for two months and the village wells are drying up. “We depend on the Heaven Emperor to live,” says Yang Ning, a grizzled 67-year-old farmer, referring to a deity who controls the weather. “I dare not hope.” The drought, which has hit eight Chinese provinces, is the worst that many locals can remember.
With only 6% of the world’s fresh water, China needs to quench 20% of the world’s people’s thirst. The country’s uneven distribution of water compounds the challenge. Chinese leaders past and present have relied on large infrastructure projects to transport water from wetter to drier places. But now climate change is testing the whole country.
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Just last month, China suffered from drought in the north and floods in the south that killed dozens of people. Attributing any of these events to climate change is complicated. But scientists expect China to increasingly experience periods of heavier rainfall, as well as longer periods of drought. In addition to floods, southern China has been hit by drought in each of the past three years. Nationwide, heat waves have become 50 times more likely as a result of climate change, according to the World Weather Attribution, a network of climate modelers.
Northern China has long been dry (see map). Most of the provinces in the region, where 40% of the population lives, are below the “water scarcity” threshold set by the UN. Meanwhile, another trend arising from climate change is affecting western China. Glaciers high in the Himalayas, which feed the country’s major rivers (as well as those of Southeast and South Asia), are retreating. A fifth of their ice cap has melted since the 1950s. For now, this is making parts of China wetter. Oases in the western deserts are flourishing. But around mid-century, meltwater runoff is expected to begin to decline. One area that will be affected will be the Tarim Basin, home to 12 million people who get about 40% of their water from glaciers.
Disturbances caused by drought alone cost the Chinese economy $7 billion annually between 1984 and 2015, according to an estimate by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They estimate that this number could rise to $47 billion annually if global temperatures rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (a threshold that may be exceeded by the 2030s if emissions continue to rise at today’s rate).
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The agricultural sector, which uses more than half of China’s water, has suffered the most. But other parts of the economy are not protected either. In 2022 the southwestern province of Sichuan experienced months with little rain. The flow of rivers decreased, resulting in a halving of hydropower production. This led to blackouts, with thousands of factories forced to curtail production.
The government is concerned about social stability. Since imperial times China’s rulers have attempted to tame the country’s great rivers, seeing their legitimacy as tied to these efforts. A former premier, Wen Jiabao, once said that water shortages threaten “the very survival of the Chinese nation” (by which he probably meant the survival of the Communist Party). China’s president, Xi Jinping, often talks about the country’s water resources and the need to protect them.
Officials tend to focus on the supply side of the problem. To reduce shortages in the north, for example, China spent hundreds of billions of yuan to build the South-North Water Diversion Project. This vast canal system pumps water from southern to northern China. Its two main canals, fed by the Yangtze and its tributaries, were completed about a decade ago. But the amount of water being moved is still relatively small, so the project is expanding.
Last year China invested over 1 trillion. yuan ($137 billion) in water infrastructure. Much of this money went into building a denser network of pipes and storage tanks to reduce wastage from leaks. Many coastal cities are building desalination plants as an “insurance policy” against water shortages, says Scott Moore of the University of Pennsylvania. These can remove salt from seawater to make it drinkable (albeit at great cost in terms of energy). By next year China plans to be able to desalinate about 3 million cubic meters of water per day. (It consumes about 1.7 billion cubic meters per day).
The government also engages in more speculative endeavors. Officials are keen users of cloud seeding technology, where chemicals are sprayed into clouds to encourage water vapor to condense and fall as rain (there is little evidence that these efforts are making much of a difference). Chinese scientists have partially covered a glacier on the Tibetan Plateau with a blanket of reflective material in an attempt to slow its melting.
China is doing little, however, to reduce water demand, which most analysts say is necessary. In practice such an approach would involve raising the price of water to better reflect the lack of supply and provide incentives for less consumption. Instead, the government keeps prices artificially low. People living in northern China typically pay much less for water than those living in America, where it is more plentiful. Chinese farmers sometimes don’t pay at all.
This has led to absurd results. A report released in April by China Water Risk, a nonprofit organization, found that 41 percent of China’s data centers, which use a lot of water for cooling, are located in drought-prone areas. So are many of China’s coal-fired hydropower plants. In the arid northern province of Hebei, once criss-crossed by camel caravans, today one finds ski slopes covered in artificial snow.
Since 2014 several provinces have been participating in a plan to create markets for trading water rights, like those for carbon dioxide emissions. But markets remain a patchwork, uncoordinated. And weak enforcement hampers their effectiveness. It is difficult to monitor a company’s water use, especially if it is pumping water from the ground.
Even if markets were working properly, the government is unlikely to let the price of water rise much, says Charles Parton of the Council on Geostrategy, a think tank in London. Parton worries about inflation. (High prices contributed to widespread unrest in 1989, although China is currently flirting with deflation.) More expensive water would also make agriculture unprofitable in much of the country. China could instead import more food, outsourcing water demand to wetter countries. But that is unlikely, given the party’s obsession with food security.
At present, the government seems to be much more interested in building canals and fixing pipes than raising the price of water. As the climate warms, this may seem short-sighted. Mr Parton believes a water crisis, which could lead to widespread energy shortages and soaring food prices, is inevitable. If the government delays taking action to reduce demand, he says, “it’s just going to get bigger.”
With information from www.economist.com
Source: enallaktikidrasi.com
