HONG KONG — The recent headlines about China’s pollution problems — many are now calling it a crisis — have focused on the worsening air pollution in Beijing and other major Chinese cities, drawing worldwide attention to the issue.
But another peril, potentially just as dangerous, lurks — one that is also drawing increasing notice: the poor condition of China’s water supplies. On Tuesday, a report underscored just how widespread the problem is: an official with the China Geological Survey was quoted as saying that the groundwater of 90 percent of Chinese cities is polluted, with two-thirds of those cities having “severely polluted” water.
Danwei, a Web site that tracks the Chinese media, noted that the Strait Times newspaper in Fujian Province on Tuesday devoted its full front page to the issue, another example of mainland Chinese media being more aggressive in tackling environmental degradation. The newspaper also notes that another official from a Beijing research center describes the intractable nature of the problem: the polluted water is often contaminated with heavy metals whose organic byproducts are difficult to filter out through traditional water treatment systems.
The concerns about China’s water supply come in myriad forms. As my colleague Didi Kirsten Tatlow pointed out last week, the thirst that the Chinese coal and chemical industries have for water risks drying up key rivers, with a quarter of the flow in China’s Yellow River threatened by 2015. India and other nations are worried about China’s “hydro-supremacy” on the continent, particularly plans to build huge new dams on rivers that flow across international borders. These dams, the Indian author Brahma Chellaney asserts, “are designed to pump electricity into China’s southern electricity grid” as nations downstream bear “the environmental and social costs.” Some see such conflicts, with the potential for “water wars,” as among the most delicate challenges to Asian diplomacy in coming decades as water supplies get scarcer.
China, of course, is not alone as it struggles to balance economic growth with growing concern about water supply quality. The debate about whether to allow gas hydrofracking in the United States has pitted environmentalists against energy extraction companies and others who see such technology as a way to finally wean the nation away from dependence on foreign energy supplies.
As with the air pollution problem, bloggers and others have grown more vigilant in calling attention to water degradation throughout China. Caixin Online recently ran a troubling photo of what locals have called “Orange Juice River” — the Daqubang River in Zhejiang Province that has turned to a rust color because of pollution. Another in the series of pictures shows a woman drawing water from Luoyang River in Henan Province after it had been discolored by red dye from an illegal workshop upstream that had been dumping the substance from sewage pipes.
The issue is not just environmental. Where there is scarcity of precious resources, the opportunity to make money is not far behind. China Water Risk, a privately financed Web portal that examines the nation’s growing water supply problems, takes a realistic look at the long-term challenges the Chinese face — and the opportunities for investors.
“At the global level, investors have responded to the threat of water scarcity by investing in specialist water funds,” the site notes. But with China expected to spend roughly $150 billion over the next 12 years to deal with water shortage issues, “increasing attention is being paid to investment opportunities in water supply infrastructure, water treatment facilities and demand management technologies.”
