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Quantity issues

Chinese freshwater resources are estimated at 2,200 M3 per person. Note: the world average for freshwater resource is 8,800 cubic meters (M 3 ) per person. So China is already on ¼ the world average. And the Chinese number is still falling .

The northern Aquifers are being sucked dry, a particularly serious issue in the North China Plain (NCP).

Over the past four decades acquifers of the North China Plain (NCP) has been nearly sucked dry; over 120 billion M3 has been pumped from the land. This is much more water than has been replaced by rainfall in the region.

The NCP had only 1800 powered wells in the 1960s . But, just by the year 2000 , the NCP had 700,000 such wells, ann increase of about 4000%.

Also the Chinese government announced in 2011 a new initiative to prevent and treat groundwater contamination – total cost $5.5 billion over 10 years. $5.5 billion is merely a beginning.

But no remedial programs are yet in force to remedy river pollution. Some estimates are that river cleanup would cost $50 billion over 10 years in China.

Finally, the Chinese Government was in 2014 close to completing a huge water engineering project. This is the South-North Water Diversion project, the largest such project in modern history. The idea of this project is traceable at least to 1952, when Mao Zedong suggested that the parched North could “borrow” water from the relatively water-rich South. The project involved first a deepening of the 1,400 year old "Grand Canal", which carries nearly 15 billion cubic The North has only 20% of China’s naturally available fresh water, but fully two-thirds of the farmland. And in such Northern cities as Beijing, each resident has available only 145 cubic meters of fresh water per person per year. This compares to the World Bank’s definition of water scarcity: 1,000 cubic meters per year. The new waterway will, however, supply only 33% of Beijing’s annual needs. The vast waterway extends from the Yangtze River in the South all the way to Beijing, a distance of about 750 miles, at a cost of more than $62 billion, not including construction and operation of 13 new water treatment plants to clean the water. The Economist , Ibid. p.44.

Authorities hope that the new waterway will help solve China’s water crisis, which costs the country more than 2% of GDP, according to the World Bank. Could this expensive project prove to be only a temporary palliative? Yes, unless China begins to change the way it prices water. Low prices have led to wholesale water waste including the construction of dozens of extremely water-intensive golf courses around Beijing. Sharply underpriced water in North China is used for agriculture, which accounts for 70% of water used in the region. And, as we will see later in this Chapter, water for household in China costs about a tenth of what it costs in Germany.

China is not alone in its water problems. An article in Science , August 5, 2011 claims that 1/3 of the world’s population now lives in water stressed conditions. This proportion will grow, over the coming decades, as some of the most important sources of freshwater are in decline largely due to climate change.

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Source:  OpenStax, Economic development for the 21st century. OpenStax CNX. Jun 05, 2015 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11747/1.12
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