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Water Scarcity, Agriculture, and Energy Are Focus of ‘Choke Point: China Part II’
›With the start of part two of Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum’s Choke Point: China series, the focus has broadened from looking more narrowly at water scarcity and energy to including the effects of food security and pollution in China too.
“From an environmental point of view,” said Circle of Blue Senior Editor Keith Schneider, the question is, “can a nation that big, operating at such a scale maintain its sustainability?”
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India’s Environmental Security Challenge: Water, Coal, Natural Gas, and Climate Change Fuel Friction
›November 23, 2012 // By Michael Kugelman
The original version of this article appeared in NATO Review.
Few regions are more environmentally insecure than South Asia.
The region faces rising sea levels and regularly experiences coastal flooding – of particular concern in a region with heavily populated and arable-land-rich coastal areas. Additionally, it is highly vulnerable to glacial melt. The Western Himalayas, which provide water supplies to much of South Asia, have experienced some of the most rapid melt in the world.
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Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times
As Coal Boosts Mozambique, the Rural Poor Are Left Behind
›November 14, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Lydia Polgreen, appeared on The New York Times.
When Augusto Conselho Chachoka and his neighbors heard that the world’s biggest coal mine was to be built on their land, a tantalizing new future floated before them. Instead of scraping by as subsistence farmers, they would earn wages as miners, they thought. The mining company would build them sturdy new houses, it seemed. Finally, a slice of the wealth that has propelled Mozambique from its war-addled past to its newfound status as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies would be theirs.
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Choke Point China Part II: Food Supply, Fracking, and Water Scarcity Challenge a Juggernaut Economy
›The original version of this article, by Keith Schneider, appeared on Circle of Blue. Choke Point: China is a research and reporting initiative produced in partnership between Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.
Where the wide, muddy waters of the Songhua River flow north from Jiamusu to the Russian border, just 150 kilometers (90 miles) distant, the whole of China’s largest treeless prairie sweeps to the horizon. This expanse of fertile grasslands endures the dark fright of cold Siberian winters and the raging winds of Mongolian summers. At night, in the scattered villages, the sky fills with stars so thick and bright that walking along unlit streets is easy.
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Beer: The Perfect Illustration of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus?
›The water-energy-food nexus seems to be garnering more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a relatively simple way to illustrate how interconnected the world is today and the kind of domino-like effects that scarcity can have.
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In Mongolia, Climate Change and Mining Boom Threaten National Identity
›July 23, 2012 // By Kate DiamondMongolia, a vast, sparsely populated country almost as large as Western Europe, is at once strikingly poor and strikingly rich. Its GDP per capita falls just below that of war-torn Iraq, and Ulan Bator has some of the worst air pollution ever recorded in a capital city. At the same time, Mongolia sits atop some of the world’s largest mineral reserves, worth trillions of dollars, and its economy, already one of the world’s fastest growing, could expand by a factor of six by the end of the decade as those reserves are developed.
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Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue
Double Choke Point: Demand for Energy Tests Water Supply and Economic Stability in China and the U.S.
›The original version of this article, by Keith Schneider, appeared on Circle of Blue.
The coal mines of Inner Mongolia, China, and the oil and gas fields of the northern Great Plains in the United States are separated by 11,200 kilometers (7,000 miles) of ocean and 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of land.
But, in form and function, the two fossil fuel development zones – the newest and largest in both nations – are illustrations of the escalating clash between energy demand and freshwater supplies that confront the stability of the world’s two biggest economies. How each nation responds will profoundly influence energy prices, food production, and economic security not only in their domestic markets, but also across the globe.
Both energy zones require enormous quantities of water – to mine, process, and use coal; to drill, fracture, and release oil and natural gas from deep layers of shale. Both zones also occur in some of the driest regions in China and the United States. And both zones reflect national priorities on fossil fuel production that are causing prodigious damage to the environment and putting enormous upward pressure on energy prices and inflation in China and the United States, say economists and scholars.
“To what degree is China taking into account the rising cost of energy as a factor in rising overall prices in their economy?” David Fridley said in an interview with Circle of Blue. Fridley is a staff scientist in the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “What level of aggregate energy cost increases can China sustain before they tip over?”
“That’s where China’s next decade is heading – accommodating rising energy costs,” he added. “We’re already there in the United States. In 13 months, we’ll be fully in recession in this country; 9 percent of our GDP is energy costs. That’s higher than it’s been. When energy costs reach eight to nine percent of GDP, as they have in 2011, the economy is pushed into recession within a year.”
Continue reading on Circle of Blue.
Photo Credit: Used with permission, courtesy of J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue. In Ningxia Province, one of China’s largest coal producers, supplies of water to farmers have been cut 30 percent since 2008. -
Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue
China’s Other Looming Choke Point: Food Production
›The original version of this article, by Keith Schneider, appeared on Circle of Blue.
Even along the middle reaches of the Yellow River, which irrigates 402,000 hectares (993,000 acres) of farmland north of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region’s provincial capital, there is still no mistaking the smell of dry earth and diesel fuel, the abiding scents of a desert province that is also among China’s most efficient grain producers.
Ningxia farmers have relied on the Yellow River since 221 BCE, when Qin Dynasty engineers clawed narrow trenches from the sand, introducing some of the first instances of irrigated agriculture on earth. Despite persistent droughts, in each of the last five years irrigation has made it possible for annual harvests to increase by an average of 100,000 metric tons.
The 2010 harvest of 3.5 million metric tons was nearly double what it was in 1990. The 3.9 million people who live and work on Ningxia’s 1.2 million farms, most no larger than three-quarters of a hectare (1.6 acres), produce the highest yields of rice and corn in the nine-province Yellow River Basin, according to central government crop statistics.
In sum, the farm productivity of this small northern China region – about the same size as West Virginia and located 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) to the west of the Bohai Sea – reflects the major shifts in geography and cultivation practices over the last generation that have made China both self-sufficient in food production and the largest grain grower in the world.
Yet Chinese farm officials here and academic authorities in Beijing are becoming increasingly concerned that China does not have enough water, good land, and energy to sustain its agricultural prowess. As Circle of Blue and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum have reported in the Choke Point: China series, momentous competing trends – rising energy demand, accelerating modernization, and diminishing freshwater resources – are putting the country’s energy production and security at risk.
The very same trends also threaten China’s farm productivity. Last year, the national farm sector and the coal sector combined used 85 percent of the 599 billion cubic meters (158 trillion gallons) of water used in China.
Continue reading on Circle of Blue.
Keith Schneider is the senior editor of Circle of Blue and was a New York Times national correspondent for over a decade, where he continues to report as a special writer on energy, real estate, business, and technology.
Photo Credit: Used with permission, courtesy of J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue.
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