Saving Beijing’s reservoirs
An environmental volunteer I know in the town of Chicheng, Hebei province, recently emailed me to say that an elementary school was dumping excrement directly into a local river. The school paid about 1,000 yuan (US$143) to have the waste from its toilets taken away and dumped into the Hei River, which feeds into the Miyun Reservoir, from which Beijing draws much of its water. My friend, outraged, made a video of the process to show as evidence of the pollution entering Beijing`s drinking water.
Beijing suffers from a severe lack of water: the quantity of water available per head is only one-thirtieth of the global average. Guanting Reservoir, the first major reservoir to be built after 1949, drew water from a 43,000-square-kilometre basin. Once completed, it provided a total of 39.6 billion cubic metres of water and irrigated 1.1 million mu (734 square kilometres) of land. However, upstream industrial and economic activity reduced the flow and polluted the water. The quality of the water fell to class five or worse, which forced Beijing to stop drawing water from Guanting in 1985. The city now takes its water from the Miyun and Huairou reservoirs. But the outlook for the Miyun Reservoir is not good: the amount of water it can supply is plummeting, and it suffers from an excess of nutrients. As well as the dumping of excrement, this is also caused by the surface run-off from fertilisers and pesticides.
Although Beijing is improving its protection of water sources and has had some successes, there are still major problems, particularly when it comes the city`s poor use of funds. Liu Baoshan, chair of the city`s rural affairs committee, says that of the 150 million yuan (US$21.5 million) fund to protect water sources, only 80 million yuan (US$11.5 million) was actually used for this purpose. Of Beijing`s 547 minor river basins, 266 remain untreated. At the current rate of progress – treating 20 rivers a year – it will take 13 years to even complete even the first stage of the process. This will not quickly improve Beijing`s water sources – as is needed – particularly when, in some cases, “treatment” actually makes the problem worse. The project will also fail to deal with problems further upstream and out of reach of the Beijing government.
The protection of upstream water sources in China tends to mean the creation of forests; little attention is paid to pollution from agriculture or animal and human excrement. Beijing plans to spend 100 million yuan (US$14.3 million) between 2007 and 2011 assisting Zhangjiakou and Chengde, in Hebei province, to complete a 200,000-mu (134 square kilometres) project to protect water sources. Other measures include extending a project designed to protect Beijing and Tianjin from sandstorms to cover restoration of vegetation and the protection of water sources. But there are no projects aimed at reducing pollution from manufacturing, agriculture and the general population – including the question of excrement.
In fact, excrement is a useful agricultural resource; currently, it is even a scarce one. Modern agriculture has replaced organic fertilisers with chemical alternatives and pesticides. This presents a major challenge to the protection of water sources. Policies must also account for the interests of local people in poor areas. Beijing could, at no great cost, change the way upstream agriculture operates and encourage the use of organic fertilisers instead of chemicals; the use of straw to feed livestock; dung to fuel methane power generation; and the by-products used as fertiliser – rather than being dumped into rivers. Beijing`s consumers could enjoy organic products produced upstream, the farmers could have a secure income and the rivers would be cleaner.
Based on studies and discussions with experts, I recommend that Beijing focuses its efforts in the following way:
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