Exerpts from Nature Magazine July edition
A crisis is developing beneath China’s thirsty
farms and cities, but no one knows its full
extent. With about 20% of the world’s population
but only about 5–7% of global freshwater
resources, China draws heavily on groundwater.
Those reserves are being depleted at an
alarming rate in some regions and are badly
polluted in many others, warned experts
last week at the International Groundwater
Forum 2010 conference in Beijing.
“The water crisis is not unique to
China,” says Frank Schwartz, a hydrologist at
Ohio State University in Columbus, who was at
the meeting. “But the problem here is orders of
magnitude bigger than anywhere else.”
Groundwater is used to irrigate more than 40%
of China’s farmland, and for about 70% of the
drinking water in the dry northern and northwestern
regions. According to Opportunities and
Challenges in the Chinese Groundwater Science,
a 2009 report sponsored by China’s National
Natural Science Foundation and China Geological
Survey (CGS), part of the Ministry of Land
and Resources (MOLR), the past few decades
have seen groundwater extraction increasing
by about 2.5 billion cubic metres per year to meet
these needs. Consequently, groundwater levels
of the arid North China Plain have dropped as
fast as 1 metre a year between 1974 and 2000,
forcing people to dig hundreds of metres to
access fresh water, according to research presented
by Bridget Scanlon, a hydrogeologist at
the University of Texas at Austin.
Already, water is scarce for two-thirds of
China’s 660 cities, according to a survey by the
Ministry of Water Resources (MOWR). And as
China’s economy expands, so will its demand
for water. The country will consume 750 billion
cubic metres of water a year by 2030, about 90%
of the total amount of usable water resources in
the country, projects the MOWR.
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