Crisis and opportunity in China

Abstract

The recently released “The Simpsons” movie begins with a horrifyingly comic premise. Springfield Lake is so polluted that just one more drop of muck will send it over the brink of disaster, with thousand-eyed mutant creatures rising fiercely from its depths. Homer Simpson, typically, invites that tipping point, in a convoluted narrative involving a pig in a bonnet. Watching it all, I couldn't help but think of China. China has lately gone over a brink of its own: the Worldwatch Institute reports that 300 million of its citizens now lack access to sources of safe drinking water. The problem isn't new, just increasingly harder to handle. Rivers are shrinking, water tables are falling, and drinking and irrigation supplies are growing ever more scarce. And when water is available, it's often polluted. Last May, five million residents of the city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu Province, temporarily lost their drinking water due to an algal bloom in Taihu Lake. (The emergency continued until provincial leaders diverted more water from the Yangtze River.) Ominously, this year, scientists reported that the glaciers high on the Tibetan Plateau – which for millennia have fed the Yangtze and Yellow rivers and quenched the thirst of hundreds of millions of local residents – are melting at an annual rate of 7%. That gives them another 20 years or fewer under business-as-usual. China's scientists and political leaders are making heroic efforts to cope with the crises, against mounting odds. Most dramatic is the US$60 billion plan to build dams and canals to divert water from China's wet south to the more populous, drier north. This could take decades. In southwestern China, meanwhile, authorities are building an underground dam, on a high limestone plateau where rainwater seeps to feed a river that eventually re-emerges in a waterfall. The goal is to block off the river, bringing the water closer to the surface, thereby supplying 30 000 local residents who now walk up to a mile a day to collect water for their homes. In keeping with tradition, Chinese leaders are trusting in mega-engineering projects. What's new, say foreign environmental groups, is blunt talk and an increasing willingness to accept help from outsiders. “China's environmental challenge isn't just to provide our children with future happiness”, deputy environmental minister Pan Yue told PBS this year, with refreshing candor. “The real question is whether our generation can survive intact.” This new, public sense of a real-time crisis has made official China more inviting to American and other foreign scientists who'd like to help. “The Chinese have the funds, but not the methodology”, admits University of New Hampshire researcher Chengsheng Li, a former Chinese environment ministry official. One effort to meet this need comes from the Natural Capital Project, for which I work as a consultant. This partnership between Stanford University, the World Wildlife Fund, and The Nature Conservancy has established a demonstration site in China, and is helping China's government to understand the trade-offs between development and life-support services from nature. Other American experts have flocked to China in recent years to work on the global-warming dilemma, and have helped the Chinese government enact energy-efficiency laws far more stringent than we have on the books at home. They report a hopeful development: lately, Chinese leaders have seemed more willing to seriously address climate change, a problem they long dismissed as an issue for rich countries alone. China is now the world's top greenhouse-gas emitter, having surpassed the US this year. The problem, of course, is that China depends on coal, one of the most destructive fuels, for 69% of its energy. A new coal plant goes up every 7 to 10 days, without any technology to capture its greenhouse-gas emissions. It's clear we need to ramp up international cooperation. The US government, conspicuously absent on this front in recent years, must start fast-tracking development and transfer of new technologies – specifically, equipment to sequester the coal-fired emissions – because all those coal plants aren't going away any time soon. As climate change worsens, China's thirsty present will become our future. Already, in my home state of California, scientists predict we'll lose one-third of our key water sources in this century due to melting snowpack. Earlier this year, long-time China scholar Orville Schell, director of the Center on US–China Relations at the Asia Society, called on America's scientists and business leaders to push for an emergency summit with counterparts in China, where efforts would be combined to find ways out of the coal–climate change crisis. It's an idea whose time has come and nearly gone.