Water

Promotion and Awareness
ADB National Media Workshop on Water - Beijing, People's Republic of China

4-7 September 2005
Beijing, PRC

Session Descriptions

• Water In Asia And National Water Policies In The PRC
• Water And Agriculture
• Water and Large Infrastructure Investments
• Urban and Rural Water Supply and Sanitation
• Financing Water and the Role of the Private Sector
• Water & Pollution And Water & Health
• The 4th World Water Forum, Mexico City, March 2006

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC), with a population of 1.3 billion, is likely to face severe water challenges over the coming years, despite having the world's fourth largest fresh water reserves. While supporting 21 per cent of the world's population, PRC has just seven per cent of its water supplies. Some of these challenges are:

• water pollution to urban and rural water supply
• intense demand for water by growing industries, farms and cities
• contradictions between the problems of drought in the north and flooding in the south
• dwindling water of the Yellow River

These can only be addressed through a coherent and integrated national water policy.

The opening series of presentations provided a macro perspective of water issues in Asia as a whole and then more specifically, the PRC. The session looked at the issue of best practices in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), PRC’s national water plan and the challenges the country is likely to face over the coming years.

Top

Agriculture is the biggest consumer of water in the PRC using around 75 per cent of all water. In the PRC, a thousand tons of water produces merely one ton of wheat, worth perhaps US$200.

Today, water is coming under increased pressure in the agricultural sector. The North of the country is facing massive water shortages due to drought, with water supplies from the Yellow River dwindling. In addition, t he water table in the North China Plain, which produces 40 per cent of the PRC's grain, is dropping by an average of 1.5 meters per year causing real concerns on water security.

The demand for water is compounded by the lack of incentives for efficiency in rural areas, with many farmers getting their water at heavily discounted prices, which doesn’t cover operation and maintenance. According to the World Bank, irrigated water for agriculture is priced at 0.03 yuan (0.4 cents) per cubic meter - about 40% of cost. This being said, however, the productivity of irrigated and well-drained land in the PRC is now among the highest in the world.

This session:

• looked at how to achieve ‘more crop per drop’ in agriculture
• addressed the key issues around how water is used in the sector including water saving irrigation techniques
• discussed how to alleviate the impact of floods and droughts – in particular flood management within the Yellow River basin

Top

The linkage between large-scale infrastructure projects and water has become one of the most contentious issues in the developing world over the last 20 years. And there are no countries that have embarked on large water infrastructure projects on the same scale as the PRC.

In order to solve the problems of drought in the north and flooding in the south, the government is constructing a gigantic south to north diversion project to take water from the Yangtze River to the dwindling Yellow River. At an initial cost of nearly $15 billion, the first phase is supposed to be completed in 2007. In addition, the PRC remains one of the most active dams building countries in the world today with an estimated 20,000 large dams across the country.

For supporters, large-scale projects such as these:

• improve irrigation
• provide cheap and clean energy
• enhance food security
• ward off droughts and flooding

For opponents, these projects:

• are the height of engineering folly
• have huge environmental consequences
• deteriorate relationships with neighboring countries
• often result in the compulsory resettlement of people

Furthermore, human-enabled water diversion is causing rivers and streams to disappear at an alarming rate.

This session looked at the pros and cons of large infrastructure projects and whether there is room for compromise. It examined the premise that large infrastructure projects can never be successful unless they are accompanied by measures to encourage more economical use of water.

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Providing clean water to rural and urban areas and providing effective sanitation is one of the greatest challenges the PRC currently faces. Premier Wen Jiabao promised to prioritize guaranteed adequate supplies of clean drinking water in his 1995 annual report to the PRC's legislature on government plans for the year.

Although more than 90 per cent of urban households in large cities have access to piped water supply, this high figure obscures shortages in many cities, particularly those in the water-scarce Northern provinces. The demand for water in urban areas is also continuing to rise with the prediction that more than half the country’s population will live in cities by 2020.

In rural areas, 450 million people continue to use unsafe water with the government pledging that every rural family will have access to clean drinking water by 2020.

Sanitation also remains a key challenge for the PRC. As more people move into cities, the problem of household waste is becoming severe with only 20 percent of the PRC's 168 million tons of solid waste per year being properly disposed of. Financing is the key.

This session examined the key challenges facing urban and rural water supply and sanitation in the PRC. Areas that were discussed included the:

• need for water conservation measures
• importance of having institutional mechanisms to allocate water
• case for pricing and the challenges in upgrading drinking water standards

The specific issues of financing water infrastructure projects were covered in the following session.

Top

Over the past decade, more than 90 per cent of the PRC's water infrastructure investments have been funded by the public sector. However, financing solely from the public sector is no longer sustainable. Other sources, especially from the private sector, need to be tapped to help finance water and especially urban infrastructure development.

The last few years have seen an influx of private sector companies from abroad playing key roles in the sector via technology transfer, training and technical assistance and wholesale ownership of treatment facilities.

However problems for private sector involvement remain. Tariffs are still not high enough to ensure the financial viability of water companies. Many private sector companies point to a complex legal framework; and underdeveloped local private sector and local financial markets.

This session examined the financial needs of the PRC’s water sector – specifically from an urban water supply perspective. It asked whether the private sector with its supposed increased efficiencies, better cost control, and more money to reinvest in neglected water networks is the solution and whether the right environment has been created for them to operate in.

Issues that were covered included the:

• importance of the domestic private sector
• importance of proper pricing, i.e., cost recovery pricing to ensure future investments,
• importance of an independent regulator
• steps that can be taken to create an enabling environment for the private sector to operate in

Attention was also paid to the different models of private sector participation including the Build-Operate-Transfer project (BOT) Water Supply project in Chengdu.

Top

The PRC today is facing severe water quality challenges with water contamination a leading factor behind the country’s water shortages. The figures are startling. According to Qiu Baoxing, Deputy Minister of Construction, some 90 per cent of the PRC's cities and 75 per cent of its lakes suffer from some degree of water pollution with already limited resources under immense strain.

There are many reasons for the water pollution the PRC faces including industry and the needs of a growing economy, unregulated factories dumping toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes and the issue of how to treat wastewater and sanitation. And there are health implications as well with arsenic contamination of groundwater and increased incidences of schistosomiasis (carried by freshwater snails) in rural areas.

This session examined the water quality challenges the PRC is currently facing, its effect on people’s health and what measures can be undertaken to improve water quality. Areas that were covered included the:

• role of local government in stepping up the enforcement of water quality standards
• need to reduce wastewater discharge
• rise in and use of clean production technologies

Particular attention was paid to the revision of the law on water pollution control and the work that is currently being carried out on the Huai River and the Tai Lake.

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The 4th World Water Forum will take place in Mexico City in March 2006, with “Local Actions for a Global Challenge” as its theme. The forum argues that local actions are keys for generating concrete results that, when combined across sectors and regions, will move the world closer to meeting the water-related targets set by the Millennium Development Goals.

In this short session, a member of the Sec retariat or Global Water Partnership provide d an overview of the forum, its objectives and what results are hoped to be gained from it.