China
is changing. The past several decades have seen immense booms in the country’s
demand for energy, steel, water and other natural resources that were already
in scarce supply, in a country that is almost the size of the United States
but has more than four times the population. Worries over the giant nation’s
need for oil peaked with the U.S. and Chinese governments’ strange dance
over Unocal last summer (see Geotimes, August 2005),
and with China’s consumption of steel, which sent the American government
into a defensive stance several years ago.
Demand for cars and energy is steadily
increasing in China. The total number of privately owned vehicles reached 13.65
million in 2004, of which 6 million were privately owned cars; that number is
up 12 percent from the year before, according to China’s National Bureau
of Statistics. China’s electricity needs have also boomed, creating more
demand for coal. Photo by Erik R. Hagen.
“China has become, in the last five to 10 years, an enormous powerhouse
and driver of resource exploitation and use around the Pacific Rim,” says
David Gordon, executive director of Pacific Environment, a nonprofit group in
San Francisco, from “forests in Russia and southeast Asia, fisheries of
the western Pacific, [and] oil resources around the world.”
As China continues its economic metamorphosis into the gorilla in the global
sandbox, it has rapidly changed its physical environment. Home to some of the
world’s largest cities, the country contains several of the most polluted
cities in the world, partly because of its reliance on coal for energy. Wood
and water needs have led to increased erosion and desertification, and the country
sends dust from its quickly growing western desert across the Pacific, carrying
sulfate and other polluting particulate matter.
Yet as the most populated country in the world moves ahead with its ambitious
economic-growth agenda, it is also taking steps to address environmental impacts
of that growth, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Thinking big
Emblematic of the scale of its environmental issues and the will that can be
applied to fix them, the government is transforming Beijing, one of China’s
most polluted cities, for the 2008 Olympics. The effort “illustrates some
of the opportunities and the challenges” of China’s environmental
situation, says Ruth Greenspan Bell, an international development expert with
Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C.
China’s environment minister has promised that the capital city’s
notorious smog would be cleared before the world gathers for the games. The
government continues to raze centuries-old neighborhoods, fueled by coal stoves,
to replace them with massive high rises that have more emissions-efficient heating
systems. Some of Beijing’s industrial sites have been forced to relocate
outside the city, shifting their pollution elsewhere. The government also initiated
a massive tree-planting campaign several hundred kilometers from the urban center,
to the west of the city, in an effort to slow the desertification of the region
that has led to intense dust storms that pass through Beijing.
Since the Great Wall was built around 1000 B.C., massive human impacts on China’s
landscape have been the norm. Migrating populations that settled in southern
China a millennium ago, for example, deforested the region that was once home
to the soon-to-be-extinct South Chinese Tiger.
“The forests in the south, where it’s tropical and semitropical, were
extensive until about 1,000 years ago,” says Walter Parham, a geologist
affiliated with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., who
has used paintings from the 1700s and 1800s to show that treeless hills and
erosion were widespread even then. Now only about 10 square kilometers (4 square
miles) are left of South China’s native forest. Local governments have
been planting nonnative fast-growing trees such as eucalyptus, as well as grasses
and other plants to halt erosion.
The
loss of agricultural land — tens of millions of hectares over the past
decade, according to the Chinese government — is drawing rural dwellers
into the cities, lured by the industrial economy that is now running full steam
ahead. Megacities that house millions of people might produce only several items
— such as Datang, one of China’s sock-producing cities, or Wenzhou,
which makes most of the metal cigarette lighters in the world, both south of
Shanghai.
The growth of Chinese cities has concentrated
the largest construction cranes in the world, particularly in Beijing, shown
here. Photo by Erik R. Hagen.
To fuel that industry, China needs power, on a huge scale. “China is very
poorly endowed with natural resources, with the exception of coal,” says
Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics.
About 60 to 70 percent of China’s energy comes from coal. The country’s
coal consumption outstrips the rest of the world, and is projected to increase
by 50 percent while the rest of the world drops by 15 percent, according to
estimates by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
In addition to coal, hydropower and damming have provided electricity necessary
for industrial sites. According to the International Rivers Network, more than
20,000 large dams more than 15 meters (49 feet) tall sit on many of China’s
rivers. The Chinese government, which is in a “mega-projects” phase
according to many analysts, is still in the process of building the Three Gorges
Dam, which will be the largest dam in the world once completed in 2009, providing
more than 18 gigawatts of electricity to six provinces, according to the U.S.
Embassy (see Geotimes, August 2003). In the end, more than 1.3 million people
could be displaced, in addition hundreds of villages and towns flooded for a
reservoir that will be about 550 kilometers long, an area several times the
size of Washington, D.C.
Despite such dramatic water infrastructure, China still does not have enough
water to meet its needs in the north, which has severely depleted groundwater
stores. To help with the water supply problem, the government has decided to
reverse the flow of some of its rivers, spending more than $59 billion on three
canals, each more than 1,000 kilometers long. Accompanying engineering efforts
will link the country’s four major rivers (including the Yangtze), which
generally flow from north to south — reversing the flow of water from the
south to the north. The Chinese Embassy in the United States projects that every
year, 44.8 billion cubic meters of water will be channeled from the Yangtze
to northern China. According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Yangtze River Water
Resources Committee projects that more than 200,000 people, most of them farmers,
will have to move to make way for the middle canal alone.
Some of these large-scale changes have yet to occur. More immediately visible
may be the issue of air quality, one of the biggest worries for China before
the Olympics.
Up in the air
Over the past 50 years, Beijing has suffered the onslaught of anywhere from
five to 15 dust storms a year (see Geotimes, June 2004). These storms deliver
thousands of tons of dust, lifted from the desiccating northwestern plains,
where demand for water, wood and agricultural land have decimated the forests
and grasslands that used to keep the soils in place.
Sulfates and so-called black carbon — elemental carbon that contributes
to global greenhouse warming because it absorbs and traps heat from sunlight
in the atmosphere — as well as other kinds of particulate matter are carried
by the dust storms. Scientists have tracked the dust all the way to California.
Along with dust, China has been creating acid rain that affects its own land
and the countries surrounding it. The impacts may be most evident in soil acidification
of forests, particularly in Chongqing, as well as in the South China Sea. The
Chinese government has a 10-year plan in place to reduce acid rain by controlling
sulfur emissions through tracking the quality of coal burned.
But that could prove difficult, partly because despite the Chinese government’s
ability to create massive changes, it also has a difficult time tracking what
occurs at the local level. Researchers from China and the United States, led
by David Streets of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, have shown that
carbon dioxide and methane emissions took a dip at the end of the 1990s, as
China took efforts to cut back on its coal burning — even as other countries
steadily increased their carbon dioxide output. Those efforts included shutting
down small mining operations in the late 1990s, and tracking what kind of coal
larger mines shipped and in what quantities.
But small unregistered rural mines remained active, says Jonathan Sinton, a
scientist with the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
in California. The government data show “a big gap between production and
consumption,” Sinton says. Also, tracking the quality of the coal is difficult,
with implications for emissions estimates, which are made directly from energy
statistics reported to various Chinese bureaus.
EIA says that China’s carbon dioxide emissions started to increase again
in 2002 and 2003. The Chinese government has endorsed emissions trading schemes
adapted from U.S. systems to control sulfur emissions, Bell says. However, she
and other observers question whether such plans are appropriate, “in view
of China’s weak record of tracking emissions and enforcing pollution controls,”
she says.
The need for alternative power sources is reflected in interest in liquefied
natural gas pipelines, as well as the drive for hydropower and nuclear power,
Sinton says. Local leaders are “actively pushing to have nuclear plants
sited in their provinces.”
National alternative energy plans, just approved to take effect at the beginning
of next year, include commitments to build 20 to 25 nuclear plants in the next
few decades, as well as hydropower and wind power projects and other measures,
says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington,
D.C., and although such ventures are promising, they are only a small part of
China’s energy needs. Still, “the commitment to renewable energy is
certainly a real one on the part of officials in China,” he says. “They
don’t have much choice.”
In the meantime, massive environmental impacts are sparking environmental awareness
among China’s residents.
Raising the stakes
In the fall of 1999, 2,700 ducks from farmer Zhang Jinhu’s flock, living
in the Huai River in Hairou County, Beijing, died from the changing pH of the
river. Zhang successfully sued the Gaoliang River Aquatic Farm, raising awareness
of the problem of alkaline wastewater discharges.
Zhang’s path-breaking case was represented by a volunteer law group in
Beijing, the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, which works to
bring such issues to court in cases structured like tort actions in the United
States, seeking damages from the effects of pollution. But current environmental
laws require that a victim must bring the lawsuit, unlike in the United States,
where cases may be brought for the public good, often by environmental activist
groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club.
Observers say that China may never allow such lawsuits, and meanwhile, its governing
bodies are in transition. The central government is attempting to distribute
some of the environmental responsibilities once consolidated in Beijing, but
it has difficulty tracking what local governments might do. Although the local
environmental protection bureaus ultimately are responsible for enforcing what
the Chinese State Environmental Protection Agency decrees, they must report
to provincial or local governments that control their finances.
Those local governments may be run or influenced by owners of industrial sites,
says Jennifer Turner, coordinator of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow
Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. And the local bodies may do what they think
is best for the economy of a region, but not necessarily for its environment,
says Wen Bo, a Beijing-based environmental activist who is affiliated with the
Global Greengrants Fund in Boulder, Colo., and who works with Pacific Environment
to develop environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China. “The
[central] government knows what’s going on, but is not necessarily able
to control it,” Turner says.
However, publicity surrounding cases like that of the duck farmer, paired with
local awareness of water quality issues and other concerns that directly impact
citizens, has kindled a nascent grassroots environmental movement, where individuals
and nonprofit groups find ways to get local industries to comply. “The
critical issue that the [environmental] movement and society there is facing
is how to deal with and manage their development in such a way as to not create
public health problems and environmental problems,” says Gordon of Pacific
Environment. The issues “are getting too large for the government to ignore,”
he says. “People are hungry for more information, what they can do to ensure
that something is done.”
Wen says that the environmental groups that are NGOs number in the hundreds,
and each might have several hundred members. “They cannot be too big, otherwise
they would attract negative attention from the central government,” says
Wen, whose activities occasionally have been considered “sensitive”
and “pro-democracy.” (The Chinese government has tracked pro-democracy
activists since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.) More than 400 student
groups, for example, with 50 to 100 members apiece, may join under one banner,
the China Green Student Forum, but they remain separate organizations, sometimes
with their own pet causes.
Despite continued difficulties in gaining legal status (China requires NGOs
to register, but they must be government-sponsored to do so), Wen says that
environmental NGOs “have more power” and are “becoming watchdogs
that pressure government on certain topics.” One such case was an effort
to redirect a highway project slated to go through protected mangroves in southern
China. Documents collected by local NGOs uncovered the local government’s
illegal actions, garnering attention from the media and citizens — and
from officials at the national and provincial government level who intervened.
Such incidents, along with some violent protests by villagers and communities
downstream of chemical plants and other polluters, reported recently in the
international press, are something that the Chinese government would like to
avoid.
Continued Growth
“The maxim ‘First development, then environment,’ was a common
refrain throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s,” wrote Elizabeth Economy
in her book The River Runs Black. But China’s “leadership has
also begun to witness the broader social and economic costs of its environmental
failure,” she wrote. More than 300,000 premature deaths a year can be attributed
to air pollution, not including other health costs incurred, noted Economy,
who is director of Asia studies for the Council on Foreign Relations in New
York. The World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme
estimate that such annual losses amount to up to $19.3 billion, accounting for
up to 2 percent of China’s gross domestic product.
“China has certainly almost every kind of environmental problem that’s
been invented,” says Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute. But even though
the country is using a lot of resources on the whole, usage is “extremely
low” on a per capita basis, he says. “The United States is using 10
times as much oil per person.” If China approaches those rates, with 22
percent of the world’s population (versus the United States at 4.5 percent),
then there will be reason to worry.
Although oil remains “much less important” to China’s economy
than it is in the United States, says Lardy of the Institute for International
Economics, the country is “building highways at a prodigious rate.”
These thoroughfares already are “thick with trucks” for interstate
commerce, particularly in coastal areas. Car purchases in the country have been
steadily increasing, although only around 7.6 million cars are in the country,
according to the World Resources Institute. EIA expects China’s demand
for oil to increase annually by almost 10 percent until 2010, when it will settle
back to an almost 3-percent increase annually for the next decade or so.
Efforts by China’s central government to control its emissions and energy
use, as well as its environmental impacts, are commendable and sweeping, but
whether they will be successful and sustainable is uncertain, observers say,
in much the same way as the government’s attempts to rework Beijing’s
environment in time for the Olympics. Political will is critical, Bell says,
but “as a practical matter, the environment more often gets short shrift
against the government’s desire to grow the economy and keep people employed.”
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