Shortage and Conflict
Despite the apparent achievements of the water allocation policies, overexploitation of water resources has made the Yellow River lose its momentum and a significant proportion of its water capacity. China's initiative to develop its western regions propelled the exploration of the untouched abundant energy and mineral resources along the upper and middle sections of the river, and demand for water to sustain these industries has kept increasing. According to YRCC, “most of the nine provinces have reached the ceilings of their respective water allocation quotas, thus water shortages are the major bottleneck for social sustainable development for the whole river basin.”
The Yellow River’s water shortage problems indeed exist at its very source on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau – the decline of water caused by global warming and the melting of Tibetan glaciers could make the situation worse. Wang Yongchen, founder of environmental NGO Green Earth Volunteer, has personally visited the source of the Yellow River in Qinghai. According to Wang, the river’s source has been constantly receding since 2009. “This year the source has receded to over 3.5 meters away from its original geographical landmark,” Wang, recently having returned from her fourth visit to the region in late August, told NewsChina.
Cui Sheng, an environmentalist from Henan Province told NewsChina that desertification caused by permafrost destruction on the Qinghai Plateau is spreading, a significant threat to the existence of a number of great rivers, including the Yellow River. More importantly, the outdated allocation plan, which was originally based on the provincial water consumption requirements of the late 1980s, is no longer applicable to contemporary economic conditions. For example, the status of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region as agriculture-focused regions meant that the plan set forth in 1999 focused on irrigation water consumption for these two regions. Nowadays, aside from agriculture, the two regions, which contain 800 kilometers of the Yellow River, are currently the two fastest developing regions in the high water-consuming coal-to-chemicals industry. Thus, for the past few years, the two provinces have had to resort to trading water use rights between the mining industry and agriculture in order to meet their needs.
“The plan is outdated,” said Qi Pu, senior engineer from YRCC told NewsChina during a recent phone interview. “The conflicts of interests among different provinces are getting more severe, and it is difficult to resolve them at the moment.”
Pollution
Over the past two decades, numerous fast-developing cities have emerged along the Yellow River, like Wuhai, a resourceful industrial city that developed fast in the middle section of the river. And like most rivers in China, the Yellow River suffers from the scourge of water pollution.
In 2007, YRCC released a water quality survey that graded 33.8 percent of the river system at “level 5” (according to China’s “Environmental Quality Standards for Surface Water”, levels 4 and 5 are classified as having medium or heavy pollution), deeming it unfit for drinking, aquaculture, agriculture or industrial use.
Zhang Qing from Water Resource Protection Bureau of YRCC told NewsChina that in 2006, the central authorities had begun to place more emphasis on pollution control, and that this, together with the water allocation project, had helped to improve the situation. Since 2009, the total length of the river with water quality level 4 and 5 has reduced to 29.4 percent. Despite the effects of pollution control measures, Zhang also admitted that it was difficult for YRCC to monitor individual enterprises and prevent them from releasing pollution into the river.
The most recently reported industrial water pollution issue along the Yellow River concerns a large petrochemical complex in Baotou, Inner Mongolia. The plant, owned by the State-owned Shenhua Group and initially scheduled to begin commercial production in late 2011, is part of a high-profile project to produce polyethylene and polypropylene from coal. Without obtaining the requisite permits to release waste water into the Yellow River from YRCC, the plant has been doing so for the past two years, causing sizeable financial losses for many local fishermen. Following an inspection in June, YRCC issued a notice to the company requiring it to stop operation and make arrangements for the treatment of its waste water.
“We only have the right to manage enterprises that release waste water directly into the mainstream of the Yellow River,” said Zhang Qing, adding that even this limited power, granted by China’s Water Law, is rarely respected by enterprises. “People regard the monitoring of and punishment for river pollution as the responsibility of the environmental department.” Indeed, YRCC only acts as a water quality monitor, once individual pollution is spotted, it is authorized only to raise suggestions to local government or environment departments but has no executive right.
The responsibility of monitoring individual waste water release lies with the department of water resources, while the environmental department deals with management of water pollution – a complicated bureaucratic situation that appears to have posed obstacles for water pollution control along the entire length of the river.
"Similar cases have been identified, and our responsibility is to stop the enterprise from releasing pollution into the Yellow River ‘directly,’” said Zhang. “We are not responsible for its internal management of polluted water treatment.”
To read the whole article: http://www.newschinamag.com/magazine/river-of-constant-sorrow
To read the whole article: http://www.newschinamag.com/magazine/river-of-constant-sorrow
