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WATER POLITICS

Courtesy of Circle of Blue, a look at the urgent water shortage developing in the Yellow River Basin, which lies to the west of Heilongjiang.  As the article notes:

“…The provinces of the Yellow River Basin produce 20 percent of the country’s grain and 70 percent of its coal, China’s primary source of energy.

The map below shows water allocations for the Basin’s nine provinces. On the original article, readers can click through the interactive map to see how a 1987 plan allocated water resources to each of the nine provinces within China’s Yellow River Basin.

By 2020, without significant water conservation initiatives — and as China’s demand for energy and food increases — we at Circle of Blue, along with the China Environment Forum, concluded that there would be a damaging gap in the Basin’s available freshwater supply amounting to 20 billion cubic meters (5.3 trillion gallons). In other words, farmers and energy producers will be 20 billion cubic meters short of the water they need to operate…”