On a recent visit to the Gobi desert, which stretches across China’s western Gansu province, I came upon an unusual sign. In the midst of a dry, sandy expanse stood a large billboard depicting a settlement the government intended to build nearby — white buildings surrounded by lush, green, landscaped lawns, and in the center a vast, gleaming blue reservoir. The illustration’s bright colors were quite unlike the actual surroundings, which consisted of dull sky that faded into a horizon of undulating, parched-brown hillsides.
尽管如此，广告牌的承诺仍然很明确：通过工程和意志力的壮举，特别是计划建造一系列渡槽，以从中国黄河支流中带来水，政府承诺建造新的房屋和重制自然。让水。
My companion, the youngChinese environmentalist Zhao Zhong非营利组织Green Camel Bell的创始人令人怀疑。他指出，近年来，黄河的水位不仅正在下降，几个月来不再到达太平洋，而且该河现在估计按数量计算出10％的污水。从字面上看，给沙漠浇水似乎是一个梦想。
Yet the sign conjuring an oasis in the desert does point to a very real dilemma: In order to sustain its rapid development, China needs a lot of water. It can only build as many cities as it can supply with clean water. And the country’s water supply is precariously limited: The Middle Kingdom is home to 20 percent of world’s population, but just 7 percent of its available freshwater resources. Rapid urbanization is quickly increasing demand for fresh water, while climate change threatens to further reduce availability.
王·鲁森（Wang Rusong），城市生态系统专家Chinese Academy of Sciencesand an environmental advisor to Beijing’s mayor, told me when I visited his offices in May that China’s most worrisome environmental challenge is not what it has too much of — pollution, sewage, carbon emissions, etc. — but what it doesn’t have enough of: “The limiting factor in Beijing’s development is water,” he said. And Beijing is hardly alone.
世界银行估计表明，中国只有人均水平均水量的四分之一。
Over the next 20 years, 350 million people in China — more than the population of the United States — are expected to move from the countryside to the cities, requiring an immense infrastructure build-out. (Imagine constructing all America’s cities in one generation.) One measure of the nation’s rapid growth and urbanization is its production of cement — China is by far the world’s largest user of cement, producing seven times more cement than the second-largest user, India. For other natural resources, Beijing is scouring the earth: importing vast quantities of timber from Southeast Asia and Latin America; financing oil rigs in Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan; investing in copper mines in Afghanistan. Yet securing enough fresh water may be the gravest challenge of all, as it is the one resource that cannot be imported.
取而代之的是，中国必须学会用它的水来做。世界银行估计表明，中国仅拥有人均水平均水量的四分之一。随着越来越多的人迁移到城市，家庭需求将增长。王教授估计，在过去的十年中，北京的用水量增长了150％。中国的电力部门是非常密集的，能源使用也急剧推动了水的需求。
最近的一项研究，“Charting Our Water Future,” by the global consultancy, McKinsey and Co., and the Water Resources Group, looks at increasing water demand across sectors (residential, agricultural, industrial) and forecasts that by 2030 China could face a gaping water shortage of 201 billion cubic meters. To make matters worse, much of the available water is located in southern China, while the majority of the population is in the north.
Across China today, one encounters frequent scenes of people struggling to deal with water scarcity. In Gansu province, not far from where the billboard boasts of a modern oasis, local farmers eke out an existence growing vegetables in low greenhouses that they cover with straw mats to retain every last drop of moisture. “There is nothing to spare,” one 40-something farmer told me. Nearby, the wells supplying rural schools have had to be dug deeper in recent years, as groundwater levels sink. In many Gansu villages, canals that run behind homes are dry in the winter months.
在中国西南部，今年春季的严重干旱影响了多达1800万人，干燥场并将饮用水限制在大城市的居民身上。中国的这样的水泡地区甚至在降水中自然出现的降低也几乎没有缓冲液，这一问题可能会随着世界的温暖而加剧。作为开创性书的作者Ma Jun，中国的水危机，解释说：“在某些地区，环境能力非常低，现在的地下水已经耗尽。我们要么要改变生计，要么为自然恢复的实现空间。我们必须认识到，在我们地球的某些地方，存在是脆弱的。”
In northern China and adjacent Mongolia, the sands of the Gobi desert are expanding — a process known as “desertification” — largely due to land-use changes, soil erosion, and perhaps climate shifts. Each spring, seasonal sandstorms strike Beijing; on the worst days, the skies are yellow, and residents are advised to remain inside. In the 1950s, sandstorms hit Beijing only every seven or so years; now they strike each spring.
In western China, the melting glaciers on the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau have already begun to shrivel streams in Tibet, Qinghai, and Gansu. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that the glaciers, the world’s largest outside the poles, are shrinking by about 7 percent each year. Tenzin Dorje, a Tibetan shepherd living in the rugged Qilian mountains, where streams are fed by glaciers, says that each year he must trudge further to find streams where his sheep can drink.
Wen Bo说：“我们不能仅考虑经济发展，我们必须考虑生态能力。”
In west China, the Chinese government projects that 150 million people must move from their homes to secure reliable access to water. As Wen Bo, an environmentalist in Beijing, points out: “This is a clear indication that we can’t think only about economic development. We have to think about ecological capacity.” He adds that part of the problem is man-made. “Problematic irrigation policies and dam construction [on the nearby Yangtze River] contributed to the recent drought,” he says. “China is not good at water resources management.”
Indeed, Beijing’s typical mindset is to dig its way out of a hole and fight challenges with massive engineering projects. One example isthe plan to move vast quantities of water from the southern Yangtze Riverto the northern Yellow River through a series of grand aqueducts carved through mountainsides and etched across deserts; the eastern leg of the project has already been built, but subsequent stretches appear, many argue, to be geologically and financially unsound. Yang Yong, an independent Chinese geologist who has studied some of the engineering pitfalls of the current proposals, estimates that there may be better ways to approach the dilemma: “You can get more water through better conservation measures than actually building the South-to-North Water project,” he said.
Indeed, China is starting to emphasize conservation. The city government of Beijing last December announced price hikes of 8 percent on residential water use, one of a series of such increases across the country recently designed to discourage household water waste. As Julian Wong, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, observes: “Natural resource inputs have long been underpriced in China. Conservation measures are going to be a priority in the coming years.”
目前，中国最大的水废物是农业部门，该部门占所有用水的三分之二以上。然而，在到达农民之前，多达45％的水消失了 - 蒸发开口运河的表面，渗入构造不良的农村转移的污垢墙，或者实际上被任意数量的不计入的水上用户，从顶部掠过according to research by Christine Boyle, a recent Fulbright fellow at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy. She points out that when it comes to water management in China, “there are a lot of moving parts, but not a lot of oversight.”
这种垃圾的原因包括农村基础设施贫困（每个村庄或地区都负责维持其灌溉基础设施，有些人几乎没有钱进行维修）；理事机构之间缺乏协调；缺乏测量或问责制，无法确切地在哪里流失。
Recognizing the problem is the first step to fixing it. As Professor Wang told me in Beijing, “First we have to change people’s minds — then our systems.”