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Keepers of the Spring
Reclaiming Our Water in an Age of Globalization
By Fred Pearce ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Fred Pearce
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-893-6
CHAPTER 1
Megawater
In a modest ceremony in Beijing in April 2003, a small bottle of water was presented to the city's vice-mayor, Niu Youcheng. To an outsider it didn't seem like much—a variant on some ancient Chinese tea ceremony, perhaps. But its significance for the future of a city of 14 million people, the capital of the world's largest country, could be profound. The water had come from the Danjiangkou Reservoir, a huge man-made expanse of water more than 600 miles away to the south, on a tributary of the River Yangtze, the world's fourth-largest river. Its arrival in Beijing symbolized the start of what China is calling the biggest engineering project ever undertaken anywhere on the planet. It is a scheme to divert part of the flow of the Yangtze, which drains most of southern China, to replenish the parched north, where rising demand for water for farms and cities is emptying the Yellow River, and where underground waters on which cities like Beijing increasingly rely are being pumped dry.
The first Yangtze water should be flowing north along a canal from Danjiangkou in time for Beijing to fill swimming pools and festoon its stadiums with fountains during the Olympic Games, which it is scheduled to host in 2008. The canal will be 200 feet wide and as long as France, crossing 219 rivers, 500 roads, and 120 railway lines as it takes some 10 million acre-feet of water a year across the crowded plains en route to Beijing. To provide this extra water the Danjiangkou Reservoir, already Asia's widest artificial expanse of freshwater, will be raised to 550 feet, displacing a quarter-million people.
But this is just one of three links planned to bring water from the Yangtze to the great cities and wheat fields of northern China. It will be complemented by two other equally large and complex diversions, one to the east and another far to the west in Tibet. By the time all three stages of what China calls the south-north diversion are completed in around 20 years, the project will be siphoning north around 40 million acre-feet of water a year. That is less than a tenth of the Yangtze's typical annual flow, but almost equivalent to the current flow of the Yellow River in its middle reaches and approaching three times what it discharges into the sea in a typical year.
This is big engineering. Chinese engineers are still imbued with a sense of optimism about their ability to remake the landscape—an optimism that has largely been lost in the West. They are attempting nothing less than the replumbing of their nation by remaking two of the world's greatest rivers. The south-to-north project follows hot on the heels of the Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir is already being filled on the Yangtze. Three Gorges will be the world's largest hydroelectric dam and will create a lake some 250 miles long. But it suddenly seems like a warm-up act for the main event, whose three stages will each match the Three Gorges for size and cost. It is as if the United States decided to dam the Mississippi at Minneapolis, at St. Louis, and again at Memphis and to pipe its waters into the Rockies to refill the Colorado. The implications are immense.
The eastern arm of this vast undertaking will extract water from near the mouth of the Yangtze and pour it into the 1,500-year-old Grand Canal. This wonder of ancient China was the largest artificial river of the preindustrial world and the first to have lock gates. It was built primarily to transport rice from the wet south of the country to the north. At one stage, it carried 400,000 tons of rice a year, helping feed an army of more than a million soldiers camped in the north to repel barbarians. But today much of it is a foul-smelling sump for China's rampant industrialization. The plan is to clean it and use the ancient waterway as a conduit to bring north the precious Yangtze water, take it beneath the bed of the Yellow River and onto the North China Plain, China's breadbasket, where it will serve the 10 million inhabitants of the water-starved city of Tianjin.
The third, western, arm of the south-north diversion will also be the biggest and most complex. It will capture the headwaters of the Yangtze behind a 1,000-foot-high dam amid the melting glaciers of Tibet. It will then lift a volume of water equivalent to a quarter of the flow of the River Nile through a 70-mile tunnel into the upper reaches of the Yellow River. Construction of this final link is due to start around 2010. All told, the south-north transfer scheme will cost at least $60 billion.
Until now, the world has largely built its cities where the water is—close to big rivers. Even modern superdams like the Hoover Dam, the Aswan on the Nile, and the Soviet-built monstrosities perched in the quake-infested mountains of Central Asia usually do little more than control the flow of their rivers. They catch seasonal floods in the mountains and release them downstream in the dry season, or they divert water to irrigate the plains of the river's own basin. But China's south-north project is something different. It aims to move water on a huge scale to where the people are. Indeed, to where several hundred million people are.
According to the country's water lords, China has no choice but to embark on such breathtaking plumbing. As Wang Hao of the China Institute of Water Resources in Beijing told me in early 2003, his country is suffering "a hydrological crisis that threatens the nation's future." Five times in the previous decade, the 3,000-mile-long Yellow River had failed to reach the sea for part of the year. In 1997, its lower reaches were dry for more than 200 days. Every last drop had been removed to fill irrigation channels and city taps. Parts of the river's parched upper basin are turning to desert, unleashing dust storms of such ferocity that a yellowish haze is still in the air when the winds from China finally turn up a week later across the Pacific Ocean in western Canada. As Wang outlined his plans to me, the river had just recorded its lowest spring flow for 50 years. Irrigation channels intended to water the wheat fields across 40 million acres of northern China had dried up.
In recent years, Chinese farmers and urban authorities alike have increasingly given up on the Yellow River and turned instead to pumping out ancient reserves of underground water in the sediments beneath the riverbed and across the wider plains of northern China. But these reserves themselves depend to a considerable extent on the river's flow for replenishment. During times of flood especially, water seeps downward from the riverbed. Low river flow means no replenishment. And not surprisingly, with replenishment down and pumping at record levels, the underground water also is running out. The water table beneath Beijing has fallen 200 feet in the last 40 years. In places near the city, 90 percent of the underground water reserve is gone. And once the groundwaters become depleted, water tables are too low for them to top up the river during the dry season. The entire Yellow River basin enters a vicious cycle of aridification.
The north of China, which has two-thirds of the country's cropland but only a fifth of the water, is estimated to be pumping from beneath the ground as much as 25 million acre-feet more water each year than rain and the river can replenish. And Wang's institute predicts that water demand in the basin could increase by a further 30 million acre-feet a year by 2030, making a vast annual deficit of 55 million acre-feet a year. At that rate, even two Yellow Rivers would not be enough to feed northern China's predicted needs.
For China's water engineers and politicians this state of affairs can be turned around only by radically altering the country's hydrology. The monsoon lands of the south will have to come to the rescue of the dry north. Dominated by the Yangtze, southern China has four-fifths of the country's water but only a third of its fields. Rice paddies soak up a fair amount of this water. But still more than 90 percent of the Yangtze's flows, which have always dwarfed those of the Yellow River, pour into the sea. And sometimes they take embarrassing detours onto the land first. In 1998, there were floods on the Yangtze. A quarter of a billion people fled its waters in what was probably the largest human evacuation in history. Some 3,000 people drowned. Many feared a repeat of previous flood disasters in 1954, in which some 30,000 people perished. So, given the surplus of water in the south, what could be more natural than to pipe the Yangtze's excess water north? We will return later to answer that question, but Chinese water engineers regard it as entirely rhetorical. The answer is obvious, they say. There is nothing more natural, and it should be done.
While China may be the first to act on such a scale, it is not alone in harboring such plans. National and international replumbing is the new vogue among engineers, for whom mere dam building has become passé. A rash of similar megaprojects—the pipedreams of engineers and geopoliti-cians around the world for many years—are on the verge of being turned into reality. Serious plans and serious funding are being assembled for schemes in the mountains of Spain, on the parched plains of India, in the Western Desert of Egypt, and maybe soon in the Australian outback, in the jungles of central Africa, and amid the icy torrents of northern Canada. All aim to cut civilizations loose from their geography, to bring water long-distance to where the people are—or where their leaders wish them to be.
* Is all this mega-engineering the inevitable future? Will the twenty-first century be the era of national water grids and planetary replumbing in the way that the twentieth century became the era of blockading rivers with dams? A handful of small, arid countries, most notably Israel and Libya, already pump most of their water down pipes that cross watersheds between river basins. So does California. Will larger nations now follow?
The world undoubtedly faces a growing crisis over its management of water. Besides the Yellow River, other great world rivers such as the Indus in Pakistan; the Colorado and the Rio Grande, both shared by the United States and Mexico; and the Nile, which is shared by a dozen countries through East Africa, have all periodically run empty in recent years because humans have abstracted their every last drop. Meanwhile, underground water sometimes tens of thousands of years old is being "mined" in several countries. By some estimates, the world's farmers are pumping out 160 million acre-feet per year more water from underground than is being restored by rains and rivers. As a result, water tables are crashing, and pumping bills are soaring.
Economists increasingly see water supply as a critical constraint on economic development. The World Bank predicts that by 2025, water scarcity will be cutting global food production by 350 million tons a year. That is the equivalent of a loaf of bread every week for every person on the planet. Yet amid concern about finding water to irrigate crops, even the basic human need for clean water for drinking is not being met. More than a billion people in shanty towns and remote villages across the developing world have no access to reliably clean drinking water. The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 promised to halve that figure by 2015. But to do so will require making new water connections to 125,000 people every day. And even if the pipes can be laid, nobody is sure where the water will come from. The summit also promised to bring modern sanitation to more than a billion people. But that too will require water to flush the toilets and empty the pipes.
On current trends, by 2025 more than 2 billion people will be living in regions of the world that are seriously short of water. So it is hardly surprising that politicians in China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and other heavily populated and water-stressed countries want their water engineers to come up with solutions—and fast. And if that means bringing water in from distant regions where there is spare water, then so be it. To politicians big engineering seems not just beautiful but essential, even though it is also a potential cause of international disputes. Yet still many believe that the heyday of giant water projects is over, that they can no longer deliver on their promises.
One strand of this argument holds that a world of mega water engineering is too dangerous because it will trigger water wars. Most of the world's great rivers cross borders. Almost half the world's population lives in an international river basin. The Danube, Rhine, Congo, Nile, Niger, and Zambezi Rivers all pass through nine or more nations. Two-thirds of international river basins have no treaties for sharing their water. Each is the source of a potential water war. Already, water disputes are a major source of tension between nations. They create trouble between India and Pakistan; Israel and its neighbors; Syria and Turkey; and India (again) and Bangladesh, to name but a few. And all the while global warming is altering rainfall patterns, rates of glacial melting, and river flows in ways that increase the risks of drought and flood—and of water disputes. The River Indus, already one of the most vital, intensely used, and hotly disputed rivers in the world, could lose 40 percent of its annual flow within half a century according to some estimates.
Another strand holds simply that even with world hydrological peace, mega-engineering is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. "Past approaches no longer seem sufficient," says one of the world's leading authorities on water management, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, California. While big engineering undoubtedly brought benefits for hundreds of millions, particularly in cities, during the twentieth century, it also had "substantial and often unanticipated social, economic, and environmental costs," he says, especially among the rural poor. In addition to the tens of millions of people who lost their homes and livelihoods directly to flooding from large dams and other water infrastructure projects, there are hundreds of millions who lost fisheries, flood irrigation, silt, and the many ecological services provided by rivers on their floodplains and beyond.
Environmentalists point out that diverting river waters away from their basins and into entirely new and often distant catchments will create a whole new suite of problems. Dams are already largely responsible for dramatic declines in the world's freshwater fisheries, but transfers between basins will further destabilize ecosystems and shift predator species and diseases from one river system to another. Many point to the appalling ecological havoc in Central Asia when Russian engineers diverted most of the flows of two giant rivers away from the Aral Sea catchment onto a vast irrigated landscape of cotton fields. The Aral Sea has dried up, turning the surrounding area into a salt-encrusted and toxic wilderness.
Moreover, during the twentieth century, most of the immediately attractive water schemes, the ones that produce the most for the least cost, were completed. The best dam sites are already plugged. Future projects will deliver less and at greater financial, social, and environmental cost.
So, before we start writing the billion-dollar checks, it is worth considering if there is another, cheaper, and better way. The need now, according to Gleick, is for a "soft path" that complements centralized physical infrastructure with lower-cost community-scale systems, efficient technology, and environmental protection. People like Gleick argue that we have got the nature of our current water crisis all wrong. We are not running out of water. What we face is a crisis about how we use and manage water. We do not have a supply-side problem so much as a demand-side problem. The bottom line is that we manage water so badly now that the potential for doing it better is vast. The solution in most cases is not more and bigger engineering schemes. We have to treat nature as the ultimate provider of water, rather than its wasteful withholder. We must learn to "ride the water cycle."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Keepers of the Spring by Fred Pearce. Copyright © 2004 Fred Pearce. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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