A year ago, while China was getting prepared to host the Summer Olympic, the issue of air pollution received a lot of media attention. Now, journalists have switched their interest to another environmental issue, one that might be China’s number one challenge in this century: water.

China has to nourish a fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of its water resources. Since the end of 2008, the North of the country has been facing the worst droughts in half a century. The Northern Plain, which is China’s breadbasket, grows three-fifths of the country’s crops but detains only one fifth of its water resources. With almost no rain in the region since last October, many farmers fear they might lose most of their harvest.

Water scarcity has been a problem in Northern China for decades, but the situation is now worsening as a result of both climate change and misuse of the resource. According to UN climate experts, more and more draughts are to be expected during this century as a consequence of global climate change. In addition to this lack of rain, the meager resources that are available are being over-exploited: most of the water used to irrigate China’s Northern plain is pumped by deep-wells at a rate that is faster than the water’s renewal. As this underground resource menaces to dry up, solutions have to be found quickly in order to avoid human and economical disasters.

Chinese government’s strategy against water scarcity in Northern China has been to deviate Southern rivers towards the North. This giant water scheme, involving the construction of huge dams, not only raises ecological issues, but it has also a deep human impact: according to Reuters’ website, which has several articles and blog posts on the topic, “12.5 million Chinese have been moved to make way for 86,000 dams since 1949”. Diplomatic issues are also at stake, as Ken Pomeranz explains it in a long post on The China Beat: most of Asia’s major rivers have their sources in the Himalayas, and except for the Ganges, these sources are on the Chinese side of the border. Any project of deviation raises thus deep concerns from China’s neighbors such as India or Vietnam. This leads Ken Pomeranz to draw quite a pessimistic conclusion: “If, as some people think, the twenty-first century will be the century of conflicts over water, Tibet may well be ground zero.”

But when China eventually solves these problems and completes its gigantic water diversion scheme, there might be no rivers to deviate anymore. With the accelerated melting of the Himalayas’ glaciers, some of the major rivers in Asia, such as the Yellow, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Indus, are now in danger. With the rivers and lakes running lower, it is a whole ecosystem that is being disrupted. A video on China Green documents this dramatic change and some of its consequences, notably on Tibet’s nomadic populations. The site also offers an interactive slideshow that shows with photographs the melting of several glaciers on the Tibetan plateau since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Given the ecological and human risks at stake, a rational and reasonable approach to the water problem would be to improve efficiency in the use of water, and to avoid waste as much as possible. This is the goal set last month by Chen Lei, the Minister of Water Resourced and Management. In a post on The Green Leap Forward, Julian Wong analyzes how the Chinese government may try to reach this goal of water use reduction. While acknowledging the urgent need for a reform, he warns against a simple raising of the price of water: farmers’ response to higher water prices will most probably be switching from rice to less-water intensive crops, and the ecological impact of that might be, paradoxically, the dropping of groundwater level.

Water use reduction is only one of the aspects of China’s ecological challenge. To be sustainable, China’s economic development cannot be as energy-intensive as what countries such as the United States or Western Europe have been doing during the 20th century. Citing the founder of a Chinese environmental NGO, Michael Mayer writes in his New York Times’ blog:“If Chinese want to live the American way of life, then we need seven earths to support them”. Pressed by its ecological and human challenges, China has to invent a new path for development in the 21st century: not a simple imitation of the “American way of life”, but an original “Chinese way of life”.

(Photo by Liang Zhun, Panzhihua dam)

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