“China can simultaneously be the world’s biggest polluter and the leading developer and employer of clean energy technologies,” said Joanna Lewis, an associate professor of science, technology, and international affairs at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at a recent event at The Brookings Institute on China’s local and global environmental agenda. “It’s not just megawatts being added, it’s actual investment in the innovation of these [renewable energy] technologies.”

A quarter of the coal that powers China’s economy is mined in Inner Mongolia, one of the country’s most water-scarce provinces with only slightly under two percent of China’s total water resources. The coal-rich city of Ordos, which produces nearly 70 percent of all the coal in Inner Mongolia, is bookended by expanding deserts—Kubuqi to the north and Maowushu to the south—and may one day run out of water and face a “Day Zero” like Cape Town in South Africa. Both the central and local governments are promoting a number of efforts to create new water supplies in Ordos, such as treating brackish waters and trading water rights. To learn more, the China Energy & Environment Forum recently interviewed Shaofeng Jia, the Deputy Director of Water Resources Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who recently completed an extensive study on water-energy confrontations in Inner Mongolia.

Chinese cities are being encircled by untreated sludge—a pungent, viscous mixture of human excreta and stormwater runoff. Four years ago in Beijing, trucks loaded with untreated sludge from the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant were illegally dumping mountains of sludge in the outskirts of the capital as “free fertilizer” for peri-urban farms. Similarly, in the southern China city of Guangzhou, disposing toxic sludge into the nearby river required nothing more than a hired boat. From the far western desert city of Urumqi to the eastern metropolis of Shanghai, more and more of China’s cities are struggling to manage mountains of sludge and municipal waste, as well as floods of wastewater and stormwater runoff. 

Coal — the reigning king of China’s energy sector — generates 74 percent of the country’s electricity and is the main source of the staggering air pollution blanketing Chinese cities. Prompted in large part by the air pollution problem, the Chinese leadership has begun to pivot away from coal by strengthening monitoring and enforcement to limit coal-fired power plant emissions, piloting CO₂ emissions trading projects, accelerating expansion of renewables, and committing to CO₂ reductions in the Paris climate agreement.

With a capacity of 3,300 MW, Sichuan’s Ertan Hydropower Plant—once China’s largest—promised to alleviate provincial energy shortages and spur economic growth when it began generating electricity in 2000. However, in what came to be known as the “Ertan Incident,” provincial officials halted all clean energy generation in Sichuan soon after the plant came online. The Sichuan power company was obligated by law to buy half of its power from coal-fired power plants, regardless of their inefficiency or environmental impacts. To keep the coal burning, the dam was forced to operate at a major financial loss.

HONOLULU – Sludge. The final, unwanted byproduct of a toilet flush. The semi-solid stuff that even wastewater treatment plants send packing to the landfill. Unseen in the steel pipes snaking high on the exterior of Honolulu’s H-POWER plant, sludge is injected into a massive boiler where it joins the city’s trash in a roaring inferno. From the gravel lot outside, it all seems very antiseptic and smells less than a stroll past the neighborhood dumpster. But the 70-megawatt waste-to-energy facility is a workhorse, processing as much as 2,000 tons of refuse each day from Oahu’s 1 million residents. All told, it generates up to 10 percent of the electricity needed to power this Pacific island.

In 2012, the U.S. National Intelligence Council judged that within the next 10 years, water problems would be a major contributor to instability in “many” countries that are of interest to the United States. South and Southeast Asia, with its many transboundary river basins, large populations, and geopolitical flashpoints, is one among a number of hotspots where such instability could occur.