Cao Siqi Source
June 19, 2017

China on Saturday began its second scientific expedition to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to assess the tremendous changes of the past decades due to climate change and human activities. 

Following an expedition in the 1970s, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) launched an expedition that will last five to 10 years. They will make a comprehensive survey of the plateau’s glaciers, biodiversity and ecological changes, as well as monitor changes to the region’s climate. 

Their first stop will be Serling Tso, a 2,391-square-kilometer lake that was confirmed to have replaced the Buddhist holy Namtso Lake as Tibet’s largest in 2014. CAS will take more than 100 scientists to the lake area and to the source of the Yangtze, China’s longest river, the Xinhua News Agency reported. 

To provide fundamental data for China’s newest national park, the Third Pole National Park, Hou Juzhi, a CAS research fellow, told the Global Times that his team will conduct research on the lake sediments so that they can learn about the lake’s climate, environment and ecological changes during the past 200 years.

As the source of several major rivers, the plateau supplies water to nearly 2 billion people. It is facing serious challenges, including glacier melt and land deterioration due to global warming and human activities. Its ecology is fragile and once damaged, it is difficult to recover, said Li Junsheng, an environmental expert at the  Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.   

“This expedition will play a significant role in discovering new species. They will also seek to explain more natural mysteries and traces of human development [on the plateau],” Li said.  

Retreating glaciers

China’s first expedition to the plateau was in the 1970s, covering many fields, including geological structure, prehistoric life, geophysics, climate, zoology and botany. The new round of research will focus on the changes since then.

Zhu Liping, a CAS research fellow leading the lake observation team, told Xinhua that the surface of Serling Tso Lake had expanded 40 percent between 1976 and 2009. Since 1990, water in the plateau’s 1,000 lakes has increased by 100 billion cubic meters. 

“Glaciers on the Tibetan plateau are in retreat due to rising temperatures. Research shows that glacier ice has decreased by 8,000 square kilometers, or 15 percent, due to climate change. In the long-term, it will have a negative impact on the ecology of the downstream region,” Li said, adding that permafrost melting would also lead to desertification and geo-engineering problems.    

A 2015 CAS report predicted that more than 80 percent of Tibetan Plateau permafrost could be gone by the year 2100, and that almost 40 percent of it would be gone within the “near future.”

The report said the plateau has already shown increasing desertification, mainly around the source region of the Yangtze River, where the desert area has reached 33,200 square kilometers, or 66 percent of the total desert land around all the headwaters of China.

Li added that human activities, such as overgrazing and illegal mining have also affected the plateau’s ecosystem.

Despite that, experts agreed that the overall situation of the ecological system on the Tibetan plateau is improving. 

The CAS report said the Tibetan plateau remains one of the world’s cleanest regions. Pollutant levels recorded on the plateau are similar to those seen across the Arctic, and remain remarkably lower than densely-populated areas. The report attributed it to the efforts of forestry conservation and restoration. 

The new national park, another major conservation effort, will be the world’s largest, at some 2.5 million square kilometers. Researchers said part of the summer’s expedition would be to establish the park boundaries, the South China Morning Post reported.  

On the archaeological front, scientists will look for evidence that can prove an earlier archaeological discovery of a Paleolithic ruin at Serling Tso, suggesting that humans might have lived there some 30,000 years ago. Archaeologists will try to answer why humans came to the plateau, where they originated, and how they adapted to high-altitude living, said team leader Deng Tao, deputy director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, under CAS.

 

Nepal’s energy minister Janardan Sharma on Sunday signed the agreement for the China Gezhouba Group Corporation (CGGC) to build the long-mooted 1,200 megawatt Budhi-Gandaki hydroelectric project.

Estimates put the project cost at $2.5 billion. A financing agreement will be signed later, ministry spokesman Dinesh Kumar Ghimire told AFP.

Water-rich Nepal has a mountain river system that could make it an energy-producing powerhouse, but instead it imports much of its electricity from neighbouring India.

Experts say it could be generating 83,000 megawatts, but its total installed generation capacity currently stands at less than two percent of that.

Demand for electricity has long outstripped supply in Nepal due to chronic under-investment and inefficiencies in the power network.

The result has been crippling for domestic industry and deterred foreign investment. Crucial infrastructure development has flagged in the years of political paralysis that followed the end of the Maoist insurgency in 2006 and the overthrow of the monarchy two years later.

India and China have vied for influence in the small country, with both pumping money into Nepal through large-scale infrastructure projects.

CGGC is currently building three smaller hydropower plants in Nepal and has completed another one, though critics have complained that the projects have consistently run over time and over budget.

Nepal’s government is also currently building a 750 megawatt plant with China’s backing.

Meanwhile, construction of two large India-backed projects — each with a price tag of over $1 billion — is expected to begin later this year after years of delays.

Deng Tingting

June 2, 2017

hanghai, with its chic cafes, glitzy shopping malls and organic health food shops, is emblematic of improving quality of life for China’s urban middle class. Yet while the city’s veil of smog has lifted slightly in recent years, its water pollution crisis continues unabated – 85% of the water in the city’s major rivers was undrinkable in 2015, according to official standards, and 56.4% was unfit for any purpose. 

These findings come from our new water quality report, which found water pollution levels in China’s other major cities are also extremely high. In Beijing, 39.9% of water was so polluted that it was essentially functionless. In Tianjin, northern China’s principal port city and home to 15 million people, a mere 4.9% of water is usable as a drinking water source.

One reason for this is that local governments have too often failed to crack down on polluting industries. In 2011, reports emerged that said Luliang Chemical Industry in Yunnan province had disposed of 5,000 tonnes of chemical waste next to a river used as a drinking water source. According to local residents, more than 140,000 tonnes of waste had already accumulated over 22 years. A year later, seven people, including employees and contractors of Luliang Chemical Industry, were found guilty by the Qilin District Court of Qujing for illegally discharging chromium-contaminated waste. The local government, however, took no action to regulate the company’s chemical waste disposal, and there was no monitoring system in place to track the transport of hazardous materials. 

The nationwide standards for the treatment of sewage are also far from sufficient. Despite some improvements in recent years, wastewater, water which has been used in the home, in a business or as part of an industrial process and may now contain hazardous materials, remains a major pollution source, particularly in urban centres. In 2015, 3.78bn cubic metres of untreated wastewater was discharged across China, including 1.98m cubic metres in Beijing alone. This is water that has been ruled unusable for agricultural, industrial and even decorative purposes dumped into rivers and lakes.

This is not for want of China’s Ministry of Environment stepping up efforts to address water pollution. In 2015, the ministry ordered provinces to actually meet the water quality targets they set every five years. For Shanghai that means ensuring there is “basically no surface water” that cannot serve at least some function by 2020.

The problem is in many cases provinces simply failed to comply. After analysing 145 water quality data sets from 31 provinces, we found that nearly half of the country missed its targets for the period 2011-15. In three provinces – Shanxi, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia – the water even got worse, with the amount of surface water “fit for human contact” falling by 1.4%, 6.3%, and 13.6% respectively.

Across China, access to drinkable water is not just a quality of life issue, it’s about survival. There have been reports of local authorities digging deeper wells to reach drinkable water, which has become harder to come by as 80% of groundwater from major river basins is “unsuitable for human contact”.

There are clear parallels between efforts to address China’s water pollution problem and action to fix its infamously smoggy air. Since 2011, when a particularly thick cloud of smog settled over northern China for days and triggered public outcry on the internet, air pollution awareness has swelled. This attention was met with swift government action, including industrial emissions inspections and the introduction of more than 2000 air quality monitoring stations.

The same vigilance is now needed to address water pollution. First, water pollution data must be made publicly available so that local governments can be held to account. China’s environment ministry announced that the 2017 water quality rankings will only be released for the 10 best and 10 worst performing cities. Data from all cities should be made public.

Second, it is imperative that province-level governments set ambitious water quality targets and that 100% of these governments meet their targets. If they don’t, it should be a black mark for officials in line for a promotion. Third, local governments should be given more resources to monitor water pollution, including increased inspections staff and improved technologies. Companies that are found to violate dumping laws should be subject to legal penalties – such as fines – that are actually enforced.

As Chinese citizens’ demand for higher quality of life grows, so too does the national focus on environmental efforts. Just as public awareness of air pollution led to significant changes in government policy, public demand for clean water could be enough to spur long overdue action.

June 1, 2017

The world’s largest floating solar power plant in China is now operational and is connected to the grid. It was built by Sungrow Power Supply Co., a supplier of photovoltaic inverter (PV) inverter systems.

The world’s largest floating solar power plant is a 40-megawatt facility and is floating in water in four to 10 meters depth. It was recently linked to the Huainan, China’s grid to supply power.

The success of the floating solar power grid is recognized worldwide. Not only because of the structure made to harvest energy from the sun but because the authorities managed to use the area for something green and useful from its former coal mining operations.

Futurism reported that due to the coal mining operations previously held in the location of the floating solar power plant, the water became mineralized and useless. Thus, constructing a power plant in the area is fitting in order to make use of the space if the water. The lake was actually a product of the mining operation itselfa. It formef from the collapse of surrounding land,  which created the cavity that was eventually filled up with rainwater.

Although technically useless to humans, the water where the floating solar power plant is located is helpful for the mechanism. It helps cool down the system that eventually improves power generation and preventing damage from heat.

Building floating power plants also avoid the use of populated regions. In order to harvest more energy for the grid, power plants need huge areas to install the solar panels. This one from China is a good example of generating power without using up space in populated areas.

Although considered one of the worst polluters in the world, China is now active in renewable energy and technologies, according to a report. Because of the success of the floating solar power plants in China, experts expect that by 2020, PV manufacturers can actually cut down the cost to up to more than third with solar power plants dominating over coal facilities.

May 18, 2017

India has cause to be concerned about the large number of dams being constructed by China. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Beijing last week to build the Bhasha and Bunji Dams on the River Indus in Gilgit-Baltistan – which India claims to be its own territory – has triggered fresh alarm bells.

The Bhasha Dam, being built with a height of 272 metres, will produce 4,500 megawatts of electricity. It is being built as a gravity dam and will be the highest roller-compacted concrete dams in the world.

The Bunji Dam is also being built on the Indus River. It will be 190 metres high and will have an installed capacity of 7,100 megawatts.

These two mammoth dams are being constructed at a total cost of $27 billion and can be seen as part of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative of the Chinese government, which is expected to bolster the Chinese economic and geopolitical footprint across a swathe of nations.

The Three Gorges Corporation, which built the largest dam in the world (Three Gorges), will help finance this project with a capital of $50 billion.

Last Saturday, India came out openly against the OBOR policy manoeuvre, describing it as little more than a colonial enterprise, while also expressing reservations against the ‘ecological and environmental’ damages that a project of this size would cause. India also went on to add that a connectivity project (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) must be pursued in a manner that respected the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other nations as well.

Activists in India concede that while Chinese engineers possess great expertise in building mammoth dams, the environmental impact of these hydro projects has not been placed in the public domain.

Environmental activist Himanshu Thakkar, who has specialised in the study of dams, pointed out, “Large dams change the micro-climate of a region. Both the Bhasha and Bunji Dams are much larger than any existing dam in India. In fact, the entire installed hydropower projects in Jammu & Kashmir do not equal even the Bhasha Dam, which is the smaller of these two dams. This helps provide an idea of just how mammoth these projects are.”

Thakkar believes, “These dams will involve large scale deforestation and will require large-scale evacuation of thousands of families. We are still to study just how close India is to the submergence area of these dams because if the river is in flood, then the backwater impact of these dams can come to India.”

What Thakkar found surprising was how the Chinese are proceeding to build these dams in disputed territory.

The reason why the Chinese engineers have chosen this particular area for construction is because the Indus River has 46 percent snow melt and is a perennial river which flows through these high mountains at tremendous speed.

Vikram Soni, professor emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has specialised in the study of rivers, said, “The more the slope, the greater the power. China is an energy deficient nation and they have negotiated with Pakistan to use the electricity generated from these two dams for their own use,”

“In terms of ecological destruction,” Soni warns, “when the Tehri Dam was constructed, it is known to have caused a great deal of ecological destruction. Since the size of these dams is much larger than our own Tehri Dam, the amount of destruction is going to be that much greater,”

“What kind of fallout it will have in the Kashmir Valley is something one will need to study in much greater detail. But, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir faced flash floods some time ago which is known to have been triggered by heavy rainfall and deforestation.”

Professor V Bhutani (retd) of the Delhi University, who has specialised in China, expresses apprehension at the stationing of Chinese troops in Gilgit-Baltistan to protect their strategic assets. “Tibet has been run over by a large Hun population. With Pakistan expected to be turned into an economic colony of China, the increasing presence of Chinese troops in the northern sectors is not something India will feel comfortable about.”

China is also planning to build 55 reservoirs on the rivers flowing from the Tibetan plateau. Already, they have completed the Zangmu Dam, built on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra in 2010. Three more dams at Dagu, Jiacha and Jeixu are presently under construction, while in 2015, work started on the Zam hydropower station – which will be the largest dam on the Brahmaputra river, which the Chinese refer to as the Yarlung Tsangpo.

The origins of the river are from a glacier in western Tibet, close to the origins of the Indus and Sutlej rivers, all of which emanate from Lake Mansarovar and Mount Kailash. Medog has been selected as the site of this mega project as the river makes a huge bend inside a giant canyon, which is around 198-miles long and 3.1-miles wide. Medog, incidentally, is located just 30 km north of the Indian border.

The Chinese have moved the entire team which built the Lhasa-Beijing railway line to execute this mammoth project, which will involve the construction of massive tunnels and reservoirs and turbines in order to generate 40,000 megawatts of power.

The first hint of this scheme emanated from an official Chinese newspaper in the 1990s, pointing out that the Chinese wanted to exploit the spectacular 2,000-metre-drop in the river to generate electricity.

The dam will be constructed before the Brahmaputra flows into Arunachal Pradesh and this water is expected to be diverted to the vast, arid areas of Xingjian region and the Gansu province in China.

India has repeatedly shown displeasure as well as apprehension with respect to China’s activities on the Brahmaputra. In fact, as far back as 2013, India complained to China about the hydro projects on the Brahmaputra.

Union water minister Uma Bharti has also expressed her reservation about these Chinese moves as she believes this can adversely affect both India and Bangladesh. Being the lesser of the two riparian countries, India is, of course, concerned about the likely fallout of Chinese activities in the long run.

An Inter-Ministerial Expert Group set up to study the impact of these dams on the Brahmaputra had not reflected positively on Chinese activities on dam-building and establishing hydropower stations within 500 kilometres of the India-China border. But China has not cared to heed these apprehensions.

As soon as India had indicated that it was planning to assert its rights within the Indus water treaty versus Pakistan, China went public with its plan to build a large dam, with an investment of $740 million, on Xiabuqu River, close to the city of Xigaze.

Xigaze is a strategic location close to Bhutan and Sikkim and is the town from where China intends to extend its Beijing-Lhasa railway line up to Nepal. Work on this dam will be completed by 2019.

Water experts insist that the ministry of external affairs and the ministry of water resources must start negotiations for an international treaty on the Brahmaputra before North East India is subjected to major water scarcity.

Dr Chandan Mahanta, an expert on the Brahmaputra river basin, who heads the Centre for Environment at IIT Guwahati, believes the ministry of water resources must set up the Brahmaputra River Valley Authority (BRVA) at the earliest.

Mahanta pointed out that with China building four dams on the Brahmaputra, it was imperative for such an organisation to undertake a comprehensive study of the Brahmaputra basin.

“There is no clarity about the nature of dams being constructed by the Chinese, who claim they are building run-of-the-river dams. The Indian government is going by that assurance but the people in Assam have serious doubts about the Chinese plans,” said Mahanta.

“We need to undertake a sound scientific investigation about both the lean flows of the river and how the dam construction by the Chinese will affect the river. We feel that once the dams are in place, the Brahmaputra will become a seasonal river, causing water scarcity in our region,” he said.

“Such an apprehension is being expressed by people throughout Asia, who want to know just how much water the Chinese plan to divert across Asian rivers,” Mahanta said, adding that a bilateral collaborative study between the two countries will help allay these fears.

India and China have an agreement on sharing the data of the Brahmaputra water but do not have any treaty, similar to India and Pakistan on the sharing of the river waters. China has so far not communicated officially about the construction of the three dams – Dagu, Liacha and Jiexu – on the Brahmaputra.

It is for this reason that the Indian government is pressuring China to set up a joint water commission or work towards having a joint water sharing treaty, following an inter-governmental dialogue on this subject.

Political analysts believe that India’s response to all these developments remains weak-kneed. Bhutani added, “India has a huge trade balance with China since we import much more than we export but even this factor has not been used to our advantage. Instead of following a policy of appeasement with Beijing, New Delhi needs to forcefully take up its concerns since water security remains critical for any country.”

May 18, 2017

If the river islands are bombed away and if the riverscape is engineered into something more like a large artificial canal, then endangered species face extinction.

Glacier Hub

May 17, 2017

Daniel Stacey 

Photographs by Brian Sokol for The Wall Street Journal

May 17, 2017

KATHMANDU, Nepal—This Himalayan nation is betting that a new energy gold rush borne of its thousands of rivers and craggy peaks will establish it as a major Asian electricity source.

While India, Pakistan and China have all developed massive hydropower plants along the Himalayan mountains, Nepal’s civil war and political instability scared off investment for decades.

Now, thanks to an inclusive peace process that allowed the country’s main rebel leader to be elected prime minister twice, the focus is shifting to Nepal. Hydropower projects worth billions of dollars are in progress, with geologists and investors scouring the landscape for more.

Government surveys show Nepal’s abundant water resources can feasibly yield hydropower equal to more than 40% of U.S. output, a 40-fold increase from today. Officials project almost a third more hydropower capacity will come online this year. More than 100 projects under construction—over 40 since last year—and others in development will yield at least a tenfold increase in the next decade to 10 gigawatts of power, they say.

“There’s such an energy shortage that any project you build will find a market,” said Allard Nooy, CEO of InfraCo Asia, a development body funded by the U.K., Swiss and Australian governments that is financing one hydro project and seeking to develop two more.

Still, power companies don’t face an easy ride.

Among the hurdles are natural ones: earthquakes, landslides and inland tsunamis from glacial lakes as warmer temperatures prompt ice melt. Two years ago a series of massive quakes killed 9,000 people and shattered the country.

Opposition from environmental groups is another difficulty, especially for a new generation of dam projects. In the past, the World Bank and Japan’s Asian Development Bank have withdrawn support for projects amid opposition from environmental groups that say large dams can damage natural habitats like wetlands, threaten migratory fish stocks, and displace traditional farming communities.

The risks are also political. Instability has led to 21 leaders in the past 20 years. A decade-long civil war killed more than 16,000 people and ravaged the economy.But since the war ended in 2006, armed rebels have mainly swapped violence for politics. On Sunday, the poor nation of 30 million people held peaceful local elections, the first in decades, a vital step toward building a more stable democracy.

The electricity demand is there. Nepal has faced rolling blackouts in recent years due to inadequate energy supply; nearby India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are growing rapidly and demanding more power.

A shift to bigger projects aims to help address that need. So far, Nepal has mostly developed river-based hydro projects that divert running flows over turbines.