![]() According to data from NASA GRACE satellites, the North China Plain’s groundwater reserves are even more overdrawn than those of the Ogallala Aquifer under the Great Plains of the United States, one of the world’s most imperiled critical agricultural water sources. The overpumping of aquifers under the Northern China Plain is a core driver of China’s looming water crisis. This lack of transparency suggests that an escalation to acute water distress could be far closer than most outside observers realize- increasing the chances that the world will be ill prepared for such a calamity. Data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization indicate that China uses nearly two and a half times as much fertilizer and four times as much pesticide as the United States does despite having 25 percent less arable land.įor decades, Beijing has generally chosen to conceal the full extent of China’s environmental problems to limit potential public backlash and to avoid questions about the competence and capacity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). ![]() Meanwhile, farm and industrial chemicals continue to contaminate the country’s groundwater, setting the stage for potentially decades of additional water supply impairments. China may be able to use impaired water resources in the future, but only with major additional investment in treatment infrastructure and a significant increase in electricity use to power water treatment processes. The quality of groundwater-which is critical for ensuring water supplies during drought-was worse, with approximately 30 percent being deemed unfit for human consumption and 16 percent deemed unfit for any use. A 2018 analysis of surface water by China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment found that although the quality had improved from previous years, 19 percent was still classified as unfit for human consumption and roughly seven percent was unfit for any use at all. Moreover, a significant portion of China’s water supply is not fit for human consumption. For reference, as of 2019, even severely water-stressed Egypt had per capita freshwater resources of 570 cubic meters per capita, and it does not have to support a large manufacturing base like China’s. So scarce are Hong Kong’s freshwater resources that the city has for decades used seawater to flush toilets. Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and other major cities are at similar-or lower-levels. As of 2020, the per capita available water supply around the North China Plain was 253 cubic meters or nearly 50 percent below the UN definition of acute water scarcity. Four decades of explosive economic growth, combined with food security policies that aim at national self-sufficiency, have pushed northern China’s water system beyond a sustainable level, and they threaten to do the same in parts of southern China as well. For China, water has also been crucial to the country’s rapid development: currently, China consumes ten billion barrels of water per day-about 700 times its daily oil consumption. ![]() It is essential for growing food, generating energy, and sustaining humanity. Unlike other commodities, water does not have any viable substitutes. Given the country’s overriding importance to the global economy, potential water-driven disruptions beginning in China would rapidly reverberate through food, energy, and materials markets around the world and create economic and political turbulence for years to come. Such an outcome would not only have a significant effect on China’s grain and electricity production it could also induce global food and industrial materials shortages on a far greater scale than those wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. A multiyear drought could push the country into an outright water crisis. China is on the brink of a water catastrophe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |