Yangtze Drought
The Three Gorges Dam was a gigantic project. An ambitious engineering feat that China felt could only enhance its ability to control a precious resource. China looked for expertise outside its own borders, bringing in international professional engineers to assist in the monumental plan to build the world's largest, most impressive Dam. Arable farmland was destined to be flooded. Millions of Chinese farmers were displaced, and became internal refugees. They had little in the way of state recompense.A historical geography was completely transformed, great swaths of land farmed for countless generations inundated. In the years since China proudly unveiled its great engineering triumph there have been some problems surfacing, areas where the great walls appear to have been breached requiring repairs. Perhaps too little thought was given to what might occur in earthquake-prone areas and how the huge shifting of tectonic plates could impact on the dam's integrity.
Remediation work was swift to get underway. And concerns may always remain that the dam is not as robust in construction and concept as its engineers and Beijing determined it would be. And now, other problems have surfaced with claims that since the Three Gorges Dam came into being the great Yangtze River, the life-blood of agriculture and potable water and manufacturing for millions of Chinese might have its levels altered by changing the river basin's water table.
Man's intervention in what nature has in her great wisdom constructed and maintained invariably appears to prove less than prudent in the long run. Yet nothing constrains human ingenuity from attempting to alter its environment. What is imagined to result does not necessarily correspond to what eventually takes place, and often enough the damage seems irreversible; nature finds a way to upset the plans of mice and men.
The mighty Yangtze, the longest waterway in Asia, representing China's most important shipping route, is experiencing its lowest level in living memory. Cargo ships are stranded. Along the river's 6,000-kilometre length, refreshed annually by glacier melts from the Tibetan plateau, levels have plunged.
China is dependent on the Yangtze River basin for 40% of its economic growth; a third of China's population live along its vast stretch.
The river is so shallow in a 220-kilometre stretch it is 50 metres narrower. The drought being experienced affects 2.1-million acres of farmland. Climate change resulting in the melting of the glaciers and far less snow and ice coverage in the mountains that feed the rivers below in traditional annual spring run-off may in the future make the current drought represent a template for the future.
Labels: China, Economy, Environment
posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 13, 2011
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