Results tagged “water”

Besides all the subways and road renovations, one of the things we can look forward to come Expo time is... cleaner water? According to officials from the local water bureau, the city is about to fulfill a three-year water-purification plan that will produce cleaner rivers and lakes by the end of next year. Since 2000, the city has established 50 sewage plants capable of processing 672 tons of water each day and earlier this year, they began an anti-pollution drive targeting 33,000 local small rivers. All of which means: we might actually be able to touch Suzhou Creek's water one day without turning into slime.

• China's Worsening Water Crisis [Forbes] "China is facing an extremely severe water resources problem. This year, northern China is experiencing a huge drought, and it is a warning bell. Solving our worsening water problem is a difficult undertaking the Chinese government and people can no longer avoid. Since entering a period of rapid economic growth 30 years ago, China has had at its disposal only 7% of the world's arable land to meet the needs of 20% of the world's population. It has had to utilize these scare land resources with relatively low average per-capita water supplies and backward technology."
• A conversation with China's young Communists [CNN] "When we requested an interview with members of the Communist Youth League, I expected an army of suits with well-rehearsed answers. Instead, we met three students casually dressed in jeans, just 18 to 23 years old.The interview was arranged by the State Council Information Office, in advance of the upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China."
• Beijing gets ready for H1N1 inoculations [China Daily] "Beijing is gearing up for a mass H1N1 flu inoculation of young students as its previous vaccination of hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationwide proved to be safe. No "serious adverse reactions" were detected among the recipients, the country's health minister, Chen Zhu, said Monday at a press conference, without elaborating on the definition of serious adverse reaction."

We don't know if this is what happens every summer in this city, but it seems like this month there have been a lot of really depressing stories about children drowning. First, there was the woman who allegedly threw a two-month-old infant into the river. She has been detained and is rumored to be suffering from post-partum depression. Then a little boy fell into the river near the Yangjia Bridge last week. He has yet to be found. And now Shanghai Daily tells us that a toddler has drowned in a freak septic tank accident in Baoshan District. Someone left the top of a septic tank open and a 5-year-old girl fell in and wasn't discovered til two days later. Good god. So keep an eye on your kids, parents, especially if they happen to be playing anywhere near water.

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Michael Zhao of the New York-based Asia Society emailed us with this 3-min trailer video introducing their new project China Green and informs us:

As the source of most of the major river systems in Asia from China to Pakistan, including the Yellow, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Indus, the Tibetan Plateau has become an epicenter of crisis. With the retreating of its glaciers - what glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has called the "fresh water bank account" of Asia - rivers and lakes have started running lower, pastures have become drier, deserts larger, weather patterns more unpredictable. Indeed, the whole ecosystem of the Tibetan Plateau and its hinterland are now slipping toward a catastrophic environmental disaster which will have continental implications far beyond the plateau itself.

Xinhua reports:

More than 1.17 million people have been affected in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region by floods triggered by continuous heavy rain that started on Saturday.

Continue reading "34 dead and 1.17 million people affected in Guangxi's flood of the century"

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Is water the new oil? Current TV takes us around China for a look at the reservoirs that have dried up, the arable land that's turned into large swathes of desert, rivers in urban spaces that have become dumps for human and chemical waste and the people's lives that have been affected. It also highlights the army of environmental NGO's that have sprung up only recently and their battle against time.

                               

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• The city's environmental work now focuses on drinking water. In one year, if things work out according to plan, Shanghai's water is supposed to be good enough to drink directly from the tap. City officials say that this vision will realized with the completion of the biggest reservoir in Shanghai, the Qingcaosha Reservoir, close to Chongming Island and a new pipe network. Could this be the beginning of the end for bottled water?
• A campaign to get more expats to donate blood has been started by the The Shanghai Blood Centre in a move to build up reserves of uncommon blood types. Rare types such as Rh negative are more common among Westerners than Chinese, and stocks of this blood type are often scarce. So if you know you have a rare blood type, donate ! If you don't, do it anyways.
• Chinese universities are gaining in status, though none of them have yet reached the world's top 100 list. At the top of this year's Top 100 Asia Pacific list, however, we find Shanghai's well known Jiaotong University, up from a previous 14th place.

A student after a school performance washing the make up from his face.

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The Yangtze River just can't seem to cut a break these days. Earlier this year we reported that the river was in its death throes and now it's being hit by droughts. This week the Yangtze River hit a 142-year record low, a plight expected to have some serious environmental and economic repercussion, particularly in our humble delta region.

The Lanzhou Morning Post (兰州晨报) reports that a growing desert is closing in on Dunhuang, Gansu Province's oasis town [translation by CDT]:

Xihu National Nature Preserve (西湖国家级自然保护区) sits in between Dunhuang (敦煌), Gansu's oasis town, and China's sixth largest desert, the Kum-tagh (库姆塔格). The 660,000-hectare region is the only green belt that shields lands to the east from marching sands coming out of the west. Wetlands in the preserve are shrinking, the result of dropping water tables and decreasing water supply from glaciers on Qilian and Altun (阿尔金) mountains. The region's Shule (疏勒河) and Dang (党河) Rivers have gone nearly dry in laces, reducing above-ground water supplies to both Dunhuang and Xihu. The expansion of agriculture around Dunhuang and a boom in logging of Euphrates poplar forests (胡杨林) for construction have made the water shortage worse.