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The Thirsty Dragon: China’s Massive Effort To Purify Seawater Is Drying Up
July 11th, 2016
Via MIT’s Technology Review, a look at how stalled projects and underperforming plants have hampered China’s desalination plans: The site of a seawater desalination plant that could provide up to one-third of the water consumed by Beijing’s households lies about 200 kilometers southeast of the parched Chinese capital. In 2014, China’s state news media reported […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragon: China’s New Silk Road Causing Regional Water Stress
June 23rd, 2016
Via Third Pole.net, a report on a recent decision by the Chinese to put temporary halt on a dam which could destroy the Siberian lake ecosystem, highlighting lack of environmental safeguards along the New Silk Road: Every Chinese person knows about one place in Siberia – Lake Baikal. It is not necessarily famous for its […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragon: Water-nomic Trade-offs Along The Yangtze
June 17th, 2016
Courtesy of China Water Risk, an interesting report on the linkages between water use and allocation, as well as pollution control and economic development in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB): For centuries, the Yangtze River has been considered a ‘golden waterway’ for transporting goods between cities and villages along the river. Now, many of these […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragon: Water Scarcity and the Development of China’s Xinjiang Province
June 1st, 2016
Via Future Directions International, a look at China’s efforts to develop Xinjiang Province and what it could mean for water resources in the region: Background China is hoping to create one million textile jobs by 2023 by growing its cotton industry in Xinjiang. The region has been producing cotton for some time, despite its arid climate and […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragon: China’s Murky Waters
May 19th, 2016
Via The Asia and Pacific Policy Society, a look at China’s groundwater challenge: During their long march towards industrialisation, all developed countries failed to give adequate attention to air, water and soil pollution. When they did, it was considered as a price to be paid for progress. By the 1960s, many of the major water […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragons: Moving Mountains To Provide Water, May Destroy China’s Heartland
April 26th, 2016
Via Foreign Policy, a detailed look at the impact that China’s north-south water transfer project may have upon the nation, particularly the fact that Beijing’s planners haven’t anticipated that they may not fully control the water line in the future, i.e. engineering blueprints for the water-diversion project date back more than a decade, but China’s […]
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