Today seems to be quite the day for water-related news…
As economy booms, China faces major water shortage:
A decade ago, China’s leaders gave the go-ahead to a colossal plan to bring more than 8 trillion gallons of water a year from the rivers of central China to the country’s arid north. The project would have erected towering dams, built hundreds of miles of pipelines and tunnels, and created vast reservoirs with a price tag three times that of the giant Three Gorges Dam.
But the plan’s biggest section, which was supposed to break ground this year, has run aground after a group of academics and experts voiced alarm about costs, environmental damage and earthquake dangers. Though a rare victory for ordinary citizens, the halting of that part of the project leaves behind water shortages that could cause the entire Chinese economy to founder.
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About 42 percent of China’s population lives in the arid north, which has about 8 percent of the country’s water resources. So while flooding regularly kills thousands of people to the south, northern China is thirsty. That’s why Chinese leaders turned to the giant diversion project, and it’s what made the successful effort to stop the western route so unusual.
The opposition was spearheaded by academics and experts, most notably Lu Jiagua, a soft-spoken retired economist at the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences. In 2004, Lu published an article painting an alarming picture of the western route, and in early 2005, he sent it twice with letters to Premier Wen Jiabo.
See the longish article for much more detail.
Matt Simmons has posted his latest presentation, Twin Threats to Resource Scarcity: Oil & Water
(Yes, the title should probably read “Twin Threats OF Resource Scarcity”.)
Q&A: How General Electric is Tackling the Water Crisis:
From the 50,000-foot perspective, how far have we come in the past four or five years in the corporate water sector?
At a macro level, it’s the same basic factors we were looking at four to five years ago, but just on steroids.
In particular, this imbalance of supply and demand is the macro driver. Globally we’ve reached a tipping point, depending on whose data you look at,- global demand now is exceeding supply. In some parts of the world it’s much greater than others.
What we see is that imbalance is being made up by water reuse, desalination continues growth but at a slower pace than what we saw five years ago, and we’re drawing down our reserves. When you look at major reservoirs, whether it’s Lake Mead or its peers around the world, we’re tapping into reserves, underground aquifers and other places to make up that deficit.
We’re seeing that becoming more of an issue. So we’re working two drivers – one is trying to reduce that demand, and then create new supplies through things like desalination, water re-use and other technologies.
The second piece we see is water quality, which is hitting our customers in two places. They’re having lower quality water coming to their asset – industrial plant, municipality, whatever – and they’re also having to meet more stringent regulations on the discharge side in some places in the world. They’re pinched in the middle, at least in the developed world.
We still see some challenges in Eastern Europe and other places where policy isn’t keeping up, so water quality continues to deteriorate.
The third big thing that’s really starting to get attention, that didn’t have nearly as much five years ago, is water pricing.
that’s really a driver for the first two megatrends. Water price still is not equivalent to [the resource's] value in most places. It makes it tough to justify some of the investment to improve our situation.
It’s one of the challenges we run into with beneficial water reuse and really approaching a lot of the development in a smarter way. Customers aren’t feeling a cost for their water so they’re reluctant to spend money to improve their situation.
Tucked into those three big trends are the regulatory components around water quality, water rights issues, and policy in general from an incentive standpoint and penal standpoint.
See the article for much more.
Population growth, urban development, farm production, and climate change is increasing competition for fresh water and producing shortages so acute that virtually every industry in the world anticipates sweeping systemic transformation over the next decade in their strategic planning, production practices, and business models.
That is the conclusion of a global opinion poll of more than 1,200 sustainability experts conducted and made public today by GlobeScan, an international public and stakeholder opinion research firm, and SustainAbility, a think tank and business strategy consultancy.
Jeff Erikson, senior vice president at SustainAbility, told Circle of Blue that the decisions executives make to respond to freshwater scarcity will penetrate almost every aspect of their business operations. For instance, executives who consider locating plants in China are likely to more carefully consider the consequences of rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau that feed some of China’s most important rivers. In the United States, manufacturers may shift new plants from the increasingly dry Southwest back to the water-rich Great Lakes region.
“Over the last 20 years water shortage has not been a lens that has been heavily considered in plant siting,” said Erikson. “That will change.”
Scots expertise in water usage can be ‘exported to rest of world’ – Scotsman.com Business