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A looming water crisis threatens everything from data centres to farms

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IN QUESHAN COUNTY, on the plains of central China, fields that are usually green with maize plants are brown and dusty. It has barely rained for two months and village wells are running dry. “We depend on the Emperor of Heaven to make a living,” says Yang Ning, a grizzled 67-year-old farmer, referring to a deity who controls the weather. “I don’t dare to hope.” The drought, which has affected eight Chinese provinces, is the worst many locals can remember.

A certain level of hardship is to be expected in parts of central and northern China. Most of the provinces in the north, where 40% of the country’s population lives, fall below the threshold for “water scarcity” set by the UN (see map). In the south torrential rains are more common. Flooding and landslides in the region killed dozens of people last month. Thousands had to be evacuated. But southern China has also been hit by droughts in each of the past three years.

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Attributing any single weather event to climate change is complicated. But scientists expect that China will increasingly experience periods of heavier rainfall, as well as longer periods of dryness in the coming years. That is going to make an already difficult challenge much harder. With just 6% of the world’s freshwater China must quench the thirst of 20% of the world’s people. To do this the country’s leaders have long relied on big infrastructure projects to move water from wetter to drier places. As the demand for water increases and the weather becomes less predictable, that process gets more complicated.

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Droughts and floods are not the only problem. Glaciers high in the Himalayas, which feed the country’s great rivers (as well as those in South-East and South Asia), are retreating. One-fifth of their ice cover has melted since the 1950s. For the moment, that is making parts of China wetter. Oases in western deserts are blooming. But around mid-century the meltwater run-off is expected to start decreasing. One area affected will be the Tarim basin, home to 12m people who get about 40% of their water from the glaciers.

Disruptions caused by drought alone have cost the Chinese economy $7bn per year between 1984 and 2015, according to an estimate by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They reckon that number could increase to $47bn annually if global temperatures rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a threshold that may be crossed by the 2030s if emissions continue to rise at their current pace. (China’s GDP was just under $18trn in 2023.)

The agricultural sector, which uses more than half of China’s water, has suffered most. But other parts of the economy are not shielded. In 2022 the south-western province of Sichuan saw months with little rain. The flow of rivers fell, causing hydropower output to decrease by half. That led to power cuts, with thousands of factories forced to curb production.

The government worries about social stability. Since imperial times China’s rulers have tried to tame the country’s big rivers, seeing their legitimacy as bound up in these efforts. A former prime minister, Wen Jiabao, once said that water shortages threaten “the very survival of the Chinese nation” (by which he probably meant the survival of the Communist Party). China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, talks often about the country’s water resources and the need to protect them.

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Half measures

Officials tend to focus on the supply side of the problem. To ease shortages in the north, for example, China spent the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars on one of the most expensive infrastructure schemes in the world: the South-North Water Diversion Project. As the name suggests, this massive system of canals pumps water from southern to northern China. Its two main channels, fed by the Yangzi and its tributaries, were completed about a decade ago. But the amount of water being moved is still relatively small, so the project is being expanded.

Last year China invested over 1trn yuan ($137bn) in water infrastructure. Much of that went to building a denser network of pipes and storage tanks to reduce waste from leaks. Many coastal cities are constructing desalination plants as an “insurance policy” against water scarcity, says Scott Moore of the University of Pennsylvania. These can remove the salt from seawater to make it drinkable (albeit at a big cost in terms of energy). By next year China plans to be able to desalinate about 3m cubic metres of water per day. (It consumes about 1.7bn cubic metres per day.)

The government is also dabbling in more speculative efforts. Officials are eager users of cloud-seeding technology, where chemicals are shot into clouds to try to encourage water vapour to condense and fall as rain (the evidence that this works and is cost-effective is mixed). Chinese scientists, meanwhile, have partially covered a glacier on the Tibetan plateau with a blanket of reflective material in an attempt to slow its melting.

China is doing little, however, to reduce demand for water, something most analysts say is necessary. In practice such an approach would entail raising the price of water so that it better reflects the scarce supply and incentivises lower consumption. Instead, the government keeps prices artificially low. People living in northern China typically pay much less for water than those living in America, where it is more plentiful. Chinese farmers sometimes pay nothing at all.

This has led to absurd outcomes. A report released in April by China Water Risk, a non-profit, found that 41% of China’s data centres, which use lots of water for cooling, are located in areas prone to drought. So are many of China’s water-guzzling coal-fired power plants. In the arid northern province of Hebei, which was once criss-crossed by camel caravans, one now finds ski slopes covered in artificial snow.

Since 2014 several provinces have been involved in a project that has seen them set up markets for trading water rights, akin to those for carbon emissions. But the markets remain a patchwork, lacking co-ordination. And weak enforcement hinders their effectiveness. It is difficult to track a company’s water usage, particularly if it is drawing water from the ground.

The price is wrong

Even if the markets functioned properly, the government is unlikely to let the price of water rise by much, says Charles Parton of the Council on Geostrategy, a think-tank in London. Officials worry about inflation. (High prices contributed to widespread unrest in 1989, though at the moment China is flirting with deflation.) More expensive water would also make farming unprofitable in much of the country. China could import more food instead, outsourcing its water demand to wetter countries. But that is unlikely, given the party’s obsession with food security.

For now the government seems much more interested in building canals and fixing pipes than increasing the price for water. As the climate warms, that may look short-sighted. Mr Parton believes a water crisis, which could involve widespread energy shortages and spiking food prices, is inevitable. If the government delays in taking action to reduce demand, he says, “it will just be bigger.” ■

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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Worrying about water”

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China

July 6th 2024

• →China is struck by floods and drought—at the same time
• →How to provoke the fury of Xi Jinping
• →China takes a step to curb anti-Japanese rhetoric online

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From the July 6th 2024 edition

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Panama symbolises the Sino-American struggle for influence

The superpowers use soft and hard power

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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies

Grain pains are growing

Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”

The country is betting on winter sports and tourism to boost growth in its rustbelt

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Источник: www.economist.com