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Beijing May Face Water Shortage Crisis by 2010
As the water level in Beijing's two most important reservoirs, Miyun and Guanting, becomes lower and lower, the Chinese capital needs to pay more attention to using rain and recycled water and stick more strictly to water-saving policies, said Yan Changyuan, director of the Beijing Municipal Water Resources Bureau, in a recent report submitted to the Beijing Municipal People's Political Consultative Conference.
Also a member of the political advisory body, Yan said he is worried that Beijing will be short of at least 1.185 billion tons of water by 2010.
"Because of the city's great improvements in its water-saving facilities, we do not see fields without irrigation water or factories shut down for lack of water and electricity produced by hydropower stations like we did in the year 1981 before the rainy season,'' said Yan.
"But the development of Beijing might be seriously affected by the lack of water.''
Yan's statistics indicate that Beijing cannot depend on the Miyun and Guanting reservoirs, which provide one fourth of the city's water at present, for the huge amount of water that it will need in 2010.
Many new dams and reservoirs have been built in Hebei and Shanxi provinces, which have reduced the average yearly flow of water into the Miyun Reservoir from 1.2 billion tons in the 1960s and 1970s to 800 million tons in the 1990s, and into Guanting from 1.93 billion tons in the 1950s to 400 million tons in the last decade.
By 2010, the water flowing into Miyun and Guanting will be no more than 590 and 250 million tons respectively.
The extraction of underground water in the Beijing area is already excessive and has caused 8 million square kilometres of ground to subside. As such, the extra water needed by the ever-growing capital can only come from the better utilization of rain and recycled water.
With proper measures, Beijing may well be able to extract 69 to 147 million tons of water from rainfall and floods and 645 million tons from recycled water in ten years' time.
However, this demands the full support of the municipal government and the adjustment of the price of water, said Yan.
To illustrate, while the city celebrates the fact that 84.7 per cent of its industrial waste water is recycled, only about 200 units in the city have the equipment to use recycled water and even fewer ever use this equipment.
"This is because no one wants to use more expensive (recycled) water when cheaper water is available,'' said Yan.
(www.chinadaily.com.cn)
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