Action urged over extreme weather
Provinces need to make contingency plans to ensure people do not go without water, minister says.
Josephine Ma in Beijing
8 March 2007
South China Morning Post

Water resources minister Wang Shucheng has called on provincial governments to draw up contingency plans for extreme weather in the face of a significant increase in such phenomena nationwide in the past year.

Mr Wang told Hunan's National People's Congress delegation at a panel discussion yesterday that China should brace for more extreme weather as a result of global climate change and work should start immediately on formulating contingency plans for disasters such as the prolonged drought in Chongqing .

Mr Wang cited a spate of natural disasters, such as Typhoon Bilis, drought in Chongqing and Sichuan , strong winds that derailed a train in Xinjiang and a rainstorm that swept away a school in Heilongjiang in the past year, as well as the recent blizzard in northeastern China, and warned they could be the result of global warming.

Some scientists had warned that weather in northern and southern China might reverse, he said.

"There were analyses that a rise in temperature may result in massive drought in China and Canada," he said. "Some other analyses said southern China may have drought while northern China may have more precipitation.

"In the past two or three years, Xinjiang, Gansu , Ningxia and Shaanxi have had more rain than before, but it is too early for us to be happy."

Mr Wang said local governments should be preparing for worse weather given the unusual nature of recent events. But he said such events were common worldwide.

"If droughts like those in Sichuan and Chongqing take place in Hunan for two years, are you prepared?" he asked.

"Will the public still have drinking water by then?"

China is the world's second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, after the US.

Scientists have predicted China will overtake the US as the world's biggest source of carbon dioxide in the next two years as its economy continues to grow.

In its first official assessment on climate change, issued in December, the central government said the average temperature in China would rise by 1.3 degrees to 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020, and extreme weather and natural disasters would occur more frequently.

Researchers also said the mainland would soon release its first policy paper on how to handle global warming.

Mr Wang said cities should also secure more than one source of drinking water to make sure incidents like the contamination of the Songhua River, Harbin's main drinking-water source, would not cut off all drinking water supplies to the public.

"A big city should not just rely on a single source of drinking water," he said.

Meanwhile, State Forestry Administration director Jia Zhibang told the Shaanxi delegation that China should work harder to cut greenhouse gases by increasing the size of forests and wetlands and reducing deserts.

Cutting down on emissions was an uphill task given the mainland's rapid industrial growth.

He said China had started growing forests in Guangxi and Inner Mongolia to absorb carbon dioxide.

In terms of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, China is the world's biggest.

More than 2,700 people died in climate disasters last year, with economic losses of 212 billion yuan.

On Tuesday, China Meteorological Administration deputy director Zheng Guoguang told an international aviation service training forum in Beijing that extreme weather conditions were becoming more frequent on the mainland and were posing a serious threat to air traffic, China News Service reported.

Kazakhstan and China Deadlock Over Depletion of a Major Lake
By ILAN GREENBERG
8 March 2007
The New York Times

ALMATY, Kazakhstan, March 7 -- A conference that convened here this week to address the fate of an ecologically threatened Central Asian basin the size of California has ended in stalemate between Kazakhstan and China, the two countries most reliant on its waters.

The heart of the basin is Lake Balkhash, the third-largest freshwater lake on earth, tucked in the southeastern corner of Kazakhstan. More than 20 percent of the country's population draws on the lake for its drinking water. Lumbering rivers flowing through neighboring Kyrgyzstan and China replenish the lake and adjacent wetlands.

After decades of water diversion to nearby factories and farms, Lake Balkhash is threatened with ''the same fate as the notorious Aral Sea,'' according to conference documents.

The Aral, in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is widely considered one of the worst human-created ecological disasters in history. Rivers feeding the lake were diverted over decades for water-intensive cotton cultivation across Central Asia. That caused the sea to shrink drastically and eventually split into two anemic parts, devastating a once thriving fishing industry and causing deadly cancer clusters in nearby villages.

Progress at this week's conference, convened to introduce an environmentally sound economic development plan, stalled when China spurned Kazakhstan's proposal to send China large stocks of free or heavily subsidized food for 10 years in exchange for a commitment from China to allow an unimpeded flow of river water into Lake Balkhash.

''The Chinese were cautious and wary, but they also were listening,'' said Anna Bramwell, chief of operations for the European Union's political office in Kazakhstan, who attended the meeting.

As part of its ''Go West'' policy, China has offered incentives to people to move to its resource-rich Xinjiang territory, which includes part of the basin area. Chinese authorities have said the now sparsely populated region may eventually have as many as 40 million new inhabitants.

On top of population pressures, the water system is fast draining into nearby rice and sugar farms that consume twice the water that European and American operations require, according to representatives of the European Commission.

According to several participants in the conference, Kazakhstan's president, Nulsultan A Nazarbayev, strongly lobbied the other conference parties to urgently adopt preservation strategies.

But Mr. Nazarbayev has angered environmentalists in the past by appearing to endorse the building of a nuclear power plant in the basin, which yields more than 30,000 tons of fish a year and contains vast amounts of coal and building materials like marble.

Dr. Bramwell said, ''We're trying to move away from the classical environmental approach to a more win-win scenario where everyone has to pay for water and take responsibility for the damage'' they create.