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WATER POLITICS

Again via the July 2013 issue of Asia Policy, an interesting article by Kenneth Pommeranz:

Asia’s ten largest rivers by volume—including the Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra (which becomes part of the Ganges), and Indus—originate in the Himalayas or on the Tibetan Plateau and collectively serve 47% of the world’s population. Inadequate or unreliable water supplies pose serious and worsening problems in all the countries along these rivers, as do energy shortages. To varying degrees, these issues threaten domestic stability throughout the region, leading countries to build dams to control water flows and generate hydroelectric power. Such projects not only pose significant environmental risks but create international tension over water- sharing on transborder rivers. Furthermore, nine of Asia’s ten largest rivers begin in China, which has no water-sharing agreements with downstream countries; in some cases, the downstream countries also have no agreements with countries further downstream. Even the sharing of hydrological data is spotty. That China, as the upstream country, is increasingly capable of undertaking projects that would address its needs at the expense of its downstream neighbors makes the situation even more tense. While China has promised to be mindful of other countries’ interests, it continues to make decisions unilaterally and often secretly. Climate change, which is likely to reduce the water supply at the source of many Himalayan rivers, will only magnify these disputes and probably make any solution that guarantees specific amounts of water or parts of a joint river to specific countries unfeasible.

This essay discusses the implications of China’s dam-building projects within the Himalayan watershed, as well as one possible project that Beijing denies planning but which its neighbors fear. The next section then describes possible solutions to current and future water disputes. The essay argues that the combination of immediate problems and longer-range threats requires, at the very least, three developments. First, more must be done to share basic data, both about hydrology and about planned projects.

Second, steps must be taken to institutionalize at least some cooperation in the exploitation of these rivers—either through multinational organizations or bilateral arrangements (e.g., joint ownership of hydroelectric dams). Third, all countries will need to undertake domestic efforts to manage water demand and reduce waste in ways that lessen dependence on water supplies to deal with future needs. It is particularly important that China implement these changes, since such efforts represent the best option for Beijing to credibly reassure its neighbors that it will not preempt the flow of rivers that begin in Chinese territory. Fortunately, waste reduction and recycling efforts are also likely to offer China more water security per dollar spent, and at less risk, than the mega-projects that its neighbors fear.

China, Its Neighbors, and the Implications of Dam-building

Increasingly, China’s prospects for continued economic growth are threatened by shortages of clean water and rising energy demand. The country has barely a quarter of the global per capita water supply, and decades of emphasis on raising agricultural yields by extending irrigation (often inefficiently), weak enforcement of pollution controls, and economic arrangements that fail to reward conservation have exacerbated the situation. Massive exploitation of underground aquifers since the 1950s masked these problems temporarily, but the country’s groundwater is being rapidly depleted. In addition, China, and the world, need alternatives to fossil fuel in order to power this economic growth. Descending from the world’s highest mountains, Himalayan water offers enormous, and still largely unexploited, hydropower potential.

With water and energy pressures mounting while its engineering and financing capabilities grow, it is not surprising that China is undertaking numerous water projects in Tibet and adjacent provinces: these include recent or ongoing projects on the Chinese portions of the Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy, and Mekong. Although China insists that none of these projects will have adverse effects on any downstream country, this is nearly impossible to ensure, even with complete transparency. Under the current circumstances, downstream countries’ anxieties continue to grow.

Lurking in the background is a possibility much more threatening than any current dam: that Beijing will eventually divert huge amounts of water from international rivers that start in Tibet to address chronic water shortages in northern China’s Yellow and Hai river basins. Such a diversion has been discussed for years. Its chief public promoter, Guo Kai, is a retired engineer and army general. The idea also has support from a number of senior military officers, as well as within the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was the subject of a much-discussed book in 2006 called Tibet’s Waters Will Save China. The Ministry of Water Resources has publicly rejected the idea as too technically complex, environmentally risky, and dangerous to China’s foreign relations. Significant numbers of other Chinese activists have also opposed it, pointing to the unpredictable consequences of mega-projects and problems that have arisen from earlier ones.

But for many of the countries downstream, this is not enough to provide firm reassurance. Among other issues, they note that China still has years of work remaining on an enormous diversion that will move some of the Yangtze’s water northward (the most expensive construction project in history), and that the tapping of international rivers would likely make use of tunnels from that project’s third, western prong (which has not yet begun). That no further project was included in the current five-year plan is thus not terribly significant. Indeed, the South-North Water Diversion plan, whether it succeeds or fails, could be a prelude to a larger diversion scheme. If it succeeds, the project would build confidence in such solutions and provide much of the infrastructure on which future diversion schemes could piggyback. On the other hand, if the project fails—for instance, if it turns out that the Yangtze cannot spare enough water to solve the north’s problems, as many think is likely—expanding the project by tapping into rivers that currently flow out of the country might become very tempting.

Thus, water politics combine conflicts that are already established, but probably manageable, with fears of much greater future conflicts. Without established institutions for cross-border water management, current problems breed distrust that inhibits progress on future issues, while unresolved long-term issues make it harder to address immediate problems. It does not help, of course, that the downstream countries have their own water problems. India and Pakistan are even more water-stressed than China, and both are heavily dependent on irrigated agriculture supported by increasingly decrepit infrastructure. Bangladesh and the mainland countries of Southeast Asia have enough water on average but are nonetheless vulnerable to even modest changes upstream, in part because the flow of their rivers fluctuates enormously over the course of the year. If, for instance, a hydropower dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo (the upper Brahmaputra) retained some water in the early spring, when flow through its turbines might otherwise be inadequate, that could create temporary problems in India and Bangladesh just when newly planted crops need water. Any changes in the seasonal rhythms of the Mekong have serious implications for the world’s largest freshwater fishery, which is crucial to Vietnam and Cambodia; and changes in river flow could increase saltwater invasion at the mouths of several rivers, with serious consequences for delta agricultures. The downstream countries on the Lancang/Mekong (Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) claim that such problems are already occurring as a result of Chinese dams on the Lancang—and several more such dams are in progress. Meanwhile, many downstream countries are planning their own dams on these same rivers. In many cases, they offer fewer benefits than upstream dams, and similar risks, but seem likely to proceed anyway because they represent the only way that downstream counties can be assured of capturing any of the benefits of dam-building.

Water Problems and Solutions

The status quo is unsatisfactory: shortages of clean water have already created local public health crises in all of these countries and could seriously imperil food security in several states. But new projects bring their own dangers. Large-scale dams in seismically active areas could fail catastrophically, or have huge unforeseen consequences, even if they succeed in engineering terms. Dams in Yunnan and eastern Tibet pose threats to important biodiversity hotspots. Potential conflicts over water resources have led some politicians and journalists to predict “water wars,” particularly among China, India, and Pakistan, and to advocate accelerated construction of water projects in order to preempt other nations’ plans.

Meanwhile, climate change further complicates matters. Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly, and there is evidence for a more general drying-out of the Tibetan Plateau; this could mean that the margin for error—and compromise—on multinational rivers originating there will narrow even faster than expected. Meanwhile, nobody knows for sure what climate change will do to the South Asian and East/Southeast Asian monsoons. It seems likely, however, that greater water storage capacity will be required to cope with increasingly erratic weather. After many years of undertaking the world’s largest dam-building effort, China can store about 2,200 cubic meters (m3) of water per inhabitant. This is in contrast to the over 5,000 m3 of water storage per inhabitant in the United States and Australia (rich countries that, like China, have large arid areas of land) and the official figures of a mere 200 m3 in India and 150 m3 in Pakistan.

Even from a purely technical and apolitical standpoint, there is no straightforward solution to these problems. That China, with the advantage of being upstream, also has the greatest engineering capacity, ability to finance large projects, and probably the least need to accommodate internal dissent makes it even harder to ensure that the interests of weaker parties are considered. But some useful steps do seem possible.

More international data-sharing would be a good start. It has, for instance, been impossible to either verify or firmly reject Southeast Asian claims that Chinese construction has exacerbated recent droughts and fishery problems. China’s recent rejection of Indian requests to expand the exchange of hydrological data on the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra— currently the two countries exchange limited data, and only during flood season—does not help that situation.2 If, as China has stated, both the dams currently under construction on that river and those planned for the future are purely run-of-the-river projects, with no storage or diversion capacity, making it easier to verify this would be beneficial.3 Tensions between India and Bangladesh over the Brahmaputra-Ganges river system have eased considerably since India, the upstream country, began providing more data. This has led to discussions between the two countries over joint ownership of a number of dams and suggests that greater transparency might have similar benefits elsewhere. If large hydroelectric dams are going to be built on the international rivers that begin in China, upstream sites will often—though not always—offer the best ratio between power generated, people displaced, and environmental risk. Consequently, projects within China in which downstream countries have a stake would probably be better than each country going it alone.

At the same time, however, China and India must also address what appears to be a systemic bias in favor of mega-projects, even when these projects are not particularly good solutions to pressing problems. It is hard to believe, for instance, that the $65 billion to be spent on China’s south-north water transfer (assuming no cost overruns) could not do more to alleviate shortages if it were spent on pollution control (allowing greater re-use), more efficient irrigation, and mundane but useful measures such as fixing millions of leaky faucets. Such efforts would certainly involve less risk of unwelcome surprises. China has done a great deal to reduce water waste, but much more is possible. In India and Pakistan, constructing water-control facilities has been so consistently prioritized over proper maintenance that World Bank reports describe both countries as following a “build/neglect/rebuild” philosophy of public works.4 For obvious reasons, spectacular projects that expand water supply do more to make careers and build political support than many small-scale efforts that reduce unproductive demand, but the latter are probably more dependable solutions, especially given increasing uncertainty about how much water will fall and evaporate in specific locations. They are also, at least in theory, easier to manage democratically.

Last, the critical issue of food security links domestic questions about controlling water demand and waste with international ones, thereby involving outside countries like the United States. Since agriculture continues to dominate water use in all these countries (close to 70% in China and 90% in India), it must be the source of most water savings. But while some such efforts would not reduce farm output, others likely would: for instance, any effort that relied in part on raising water prices (as has already happened to some extent) would inevitably cause some economically marginal crop production to cease. Meanwhile, food demand will continue to grow, especially if, as expected, increasingly prosperous people demand diets with more protein. This raises crucial questions about whether the hard-won self-sufficiency of China and India in basic foodstuffs is sustainable—or even necessarily desirable—given their unfavorable ratios of land and water to population. Probably nobody would like a world in which such huge countries became heavily import-dependent; and the accelerated displacement of farmers would exacerbate already difficult social questions, even if enough food could be purchased abroad to replace the production that would be lost as more people quit farming. Thus, transfers of water- saving technologies are most likely a better long-term palliative for water shortages than greater imports of food. But if less nationalistic attitudes toward transborder rivers must be nurtured, and starting this process must involve restraining agricultural water use, guarantees that food imports will be available if needed could help backstop unpopular decisions. While only a small part of any solution to Asia’s water crises, such guarantees might, at the margin, provide incentives to increase regional cooperation; and regional cooperation on these issues cannot wait much longer.