Water

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

12-14 September 2005
Chengdu, PRC

Session Descriptions

• Water In Asia And National Water Policies In The PRC and the Western Provinces
• Water & Pollution And Water & Health
• Rural and Urban Water Supply
• Managing Industrial Wastewater And Domestic Wastewater and Sanitation
• Dams and other Infrastructure Investments
• Water and Agriculture
• Presentation From The World Water Council Or Mexican Secretariat On The 4^th World Water Forum

The People's 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, and
• water shortages facing the western provinces.

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

Water is also key to the government campaign to develop the country's vast western region - home to 285 million people and crucial to the PRC's economic rise and social stability. The region is rich in land resources but plagued by the scarcity of water resources and ever-worsening soil erosion problems. The per capita share of water resources is 15 percent of the national average and three percent of the world average. Of all ADB-loans in the PRC, 80 percent target the western provinces.

The opening series of presentations provided an overview of water issues in Asia as a whole and then more specifically, the PRC and the Western provinces. The session looked at the issue of best practices in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and at the importance of protecting water sources, particularly in upstream areas in the West of the country.

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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.

The western parts of the country have been particularly affected. In many areas, water quality is far from the state required standard for drinking with nearly 90 percent of women in the region suffering from water-borne illnesses. Groundwater contamination is also prevalent.

This session examined the water quality challenges the PRC and the western provinces are 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
• advent of recycling technologies (an issue which will be addressed further in the last session of the day)
• rise in and use of cleaner production technologies.

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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 and Western 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.

Water shortages and the affect of the diversions of rivers and streams have been seen particularly in the Western provinces. In the western province of Qinghai alone, 2,000 lakes have dried up, affecting levels in the Yellow River. In Shananxi province, it is estimated that 3.5 million farmers drink polluted water - 13 per cent of the province's total rural population with no water treatment facilities available.

Other challenges rural and urban residents face include groundwater pollution and contamination - often the result of water-intensive industries, such as paper mills.

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

• need for water conservation measures,
• importance of having institutional mechanisms to allocate water,
• for pricing.

Specific attention was paid to the role of the private sector, the different models of private sector involvement and the ADB-financed Chengdu Water Supply Project, the first Build Operate Transfer (BOT) in the PRC. The session examined whether it can act as a model for future private sector investment.

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Managing wastewater and sanitation to improve the urban and rural environments and improve water efficiencies has become one of the PRC's overriding challenges.

Many of the country's smelters, paper mills and petrochemical plants are beginning to realize that they can no longer expect the huge amounts of water they require for operation.

Furthermore, the last few years has seen a greater focus on creating a recycling-based economy (RBE) with many companies shifting their attention to the effective control of wasted water coming from the oil, coal, gas and paper industries. According to Zhang Lijun, vice director of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the government has invested 110 billion yuan (13.3 billion US dollars) in the ecological environment protection in the Western provinces during the past five years.

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 tonnes of solid waste per year being properly disposed of. Moreover, rural residents in western provinces, often rely on unhygienic open pit latrines for sanitation leading to a decline in health.

Linking into the previous sessions on water supply, pollution and health, this session looked at means of controlling, treating and reusing industrial and domestic wastewater and domestic sanitation and issuing such as recharging urban groundwater.

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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.

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 with plans to open up a Western route through remote mountains sometime after 2010. In addition, the PRC remains one of the most active dams building countries in the world today with an estimated 45,000 large dams across the country. A number of new dams are proposed to be built on the Nu and Jinsha Rivers in Yunnan and the Min River in Sichuan provinces.

For supporters, large-scale projects such as these:

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

For opponents, these projects:

• are the height of engineering folly,
• have huge environmental consequences,
• deteriorate relationships with neighboring countries, and
• 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 also 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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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, particularly in the water-scare western provinces. The scarcity of fertile soil, with soil erosion a growing problem and the drying up of water sources, has made the West a difficult region for widespread agricultural production activities.

In the western province of Qinghai alone, 2,000 lakes have dried up, affecting levels in the Yellow River, one of the PRC's great waterways. Farmers in the chronically dry northern and western regions of China, including Ningxia and Gansu, are also drawing far more than their fair share of water from the Yellow River for climatically inappropriate and thirsty crops. Furthermore, overplowing and overgrazing, together with strong winds, are leading to increased desertification.

This session looked at means of incorporating greater efficiencies into agriculture from water conservation techniques to high efficiency irrigation systems and dry farming. It also discussed options on how best to alleviate the impact of floods and droughts.

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The 4^th 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 Secretariat or Global Water Partnership provided an overview of the forum, its objectives and what results are hoped to be gained from it.