Seminar on the Brahmaputra Diversion

This article in Chinadialogue.com reports  on a Water Seminar recently held in China on the Water Diversion of the Brahmaputra.
What is surprising is that Wang Guangqian, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the most 'serious', if not 'scientific', proponent of the project was not invited (did not want to participate). 
A few months ago, Wang made a new proposal to divert waters from the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra River to the northwestern province of Xinjiang. The water diversion route in his proposal, named the “Grand Western Canal,” was different from the “western canal” mentioned in China’s South-North Water Diversion Project approved by the State Council in December 2002 and slightly different than Guo Kai's proposal.
I had already mentioned about the madness of Guo Kai on this blog. It is fact that he is not taken seriously in China, though big lobbies may be supporting him.
In a way, it was easy to discredit Guo Kai, but it would have been more interesting to have a real debate on the subject with the participation of other proponents of the mega project.
One of the problems is that there are some 'experts' on India who think like Guo Kai “the Brahmaputra has plenty of water; it won’t make any difference to India.” This is sad and could have grave consequences.
Geologist Xu Daoyi has a crucial point: Tibet is a seismic area. 
Should the recent earthquake in Sikkim makes proponents of large dams or structures. on the Teesta or elsewhere, wiser. 
One can doubt it. 

Divided waters in China
Chinadialogue.com
Zhou Wei
September 20, 2011
Chinese scientists troubled by radical proposals to divert Tibet’s water are making their voices heard. Zhou Wei listened in at a seminar about the Shuotian Canal.
“Even shouting can cause an avalanche in these steep snowy valleys, said Xu, let alone the blasting, artificial landslides, dyke-building and river-blocking required by the Shuotian scheme.”
One of the boldest engineering concepts to emerge in China in recent years is a plan to “save” the country by transferring water from Tibet to the parched north. Among the schemes put forward, bringing water from Shuomatan point in Tibet to the city of Tianjin on China’s east coast – the “Shuotian Canal” – has received particular attention. It is said to have the backing of military figures and academics, but at a seminar last month scientists from a number of different disciplines were merciless in their criticism of the scheme.
The early August gathering, organised by Chinese NGO Green Earth Volunteers, brought together experts in geology, meteorology and wetlands conservation with the man behind the proposal, Guo Kai. Guo is convinced the Yarlung Zangbo River (known as the Brahmaputra once it crosses the border into India) is the solution to water shortages in some of China’s driest parts. (See chinadialogue article “Diversion debate” for more detail on proposed water transfer schemes from western China.)
Sometimes referred to as a modern day Guo Shoujing, a Yuan Dynasty water expert, Guo Kai comes from a family of hydraulic engineers and is a retired technical cadre. His business card lists a number of titles: originator and chief designer of the Shuotian Canal, author, professor, economist, vice-director and secretary of the Shuotian Canal Preparatory Committee and chairman of the Beijing Shuotian Consulting Development Company.
Guo explained that he originally planned to bring water from the Yellow River to Beijing – but then the Yellow River dried up. He also thought about the Yangtze River, but its western reaches didn’t hold enough water either. “But the Brahmaputra has plenty of water; it won’t make any difference to India,” he said.
Promotional material from the Shuotian Canal Preparatory Committee shows the canal cutting across China from west to east, crossing five different rivers on its journey from the Brahmaputra to the north-east and requiring construction of 10 separate reservoirs. Were it to go ahead, on its way to the Yellow River the canal would take water to more than 14 provinces and municipalities in the west and north of China, including Qinghai, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Beijing – and generate electricity en route. The proposal claims the canal would in one fell swoop solve China’s shortages of water, electricity, grain and oil, relieve pollution and even ease the rural-urban wealth gap. Examples of support from senior levels of government over the years are also provided.
Before the seminar, Xu Daoyi, a retired researcher from China Earthquake Administration’s Institute of Geology had scrutinised the book How China will Save the World, published this year, which sets out the case for Guo Kai’s scheme. Xu pointed out that the proposal barely touches on the seismic and environmental risks, even though the canal would cross several earthquake-prone areas. Its tunnels would also pass through the high mountains of the south west, where devastating landslides are possible. There is no way to route the project without passing through these geologically unstable areas.
Xu listed 10 major earthquakes that have struck the south-west over the last 60 years. Pointing to a table of earthquake data, he asked Guo Kai: “What impact will an earthquake have on your canal? You don’t seem to have thought about that. If one of your tunnels collapses, what then?” Xu pointed out that reconstruction following an earthquake could be more expensive than the original build.
Even shouting too loudly can cause an avalanche in these steep snowy valleys, continued Xu, let alone the blasting, artificial landslides, dyke-building and river-blocking required by the Shuotian scheme. The map of the proposed canal also indicates that Qinghai Lake will be used as a reservoir – but it is a saltwater lake. The proposal says salinity will be reduced by the water from the canal, when in fact the water of the canal will become salty, argued Xu. The proposal is poorly thought through, he concluded: if the Shuotian team really wants to do this, then they should be prepared to do the necessary scientific research.
Chen Kelin, head of Wetlands International’s Beijing office, expressed concern about protecting wetlands on the Tibetan Plateau. The Yellow River dries up almost every year now – in 1999, the dry patch continued for more than seven months – and the ground in many areas along its banks has become salty, he said. The 490,000-hectare Zoige wetland on the upper reaches of the Yellow River has plenty of capacity to store water, but is suffering from over-grazing, pest infestations and the impacts of mining, all man-made issues. “If we looked after it properly, there wouldn’t be any need for wasteful water-transfer projects,” said Chen.
In his speech, Guo Kai described the Tibetan Plateau as an area of permafrost, with huge quantities of water resources in the form of ice – as the climate warms and that ice melts, that water should be used, he said. Meanwhile, the Shuotian team’s solution to Chen Kelin’s concerns about the Zoige Wetlands was another water transfer scheme: “bringing in water from Sichuan’s Dadu River”.
But Guo Kai’s arguments received short shrift from the assembled scientists. Tao Zuyu, a retired professor from Peking University’s Department of Atmospheric Physics, was next to jump in. He started by criticising the map the Shuotian Canal team had provided to the seminar’s participants: beautifully made, with a detailed explanation of the project in the back, but lacking scale or contour lines, it looked more like a tourist map than a scientific document, making the project seem like a mere fantasy, he said.
We’re all entitled to our dreams, Tao said, but if you want to turn dreams into reality, you have to put the work in. How much water is there to transfer, and will moving it change the climate? Desert formation is linked to atmospheric circulation, which in turn is connected the layout of the land and ocean, he said – the implications need to be worked through.
Geologist Yang Yong has been researching water diversion in western China for the past four years. He had four major concerns: first, he said, there is still vigorous debate over the risk of triggering earthquakes and geological disasters on the Tibetan Plateau with such schemes. Second, the points identified for water diversion into the Shuotian Canal would not actually be able to supply the quantity of water claimed in the proposal. Third, the canal would change the entire distribution of water across China, particularly in the south-west: there are already many hydropower stations in this region, but the transfer and damming of rivers for the Shuotian Canal would result in existing dams and power stations lying idle: a massive waste.
Finally, Yang questioned whether the project had the necessary mechanisms and systems to respond to situations such as drought, or climatic changes caused by the scheme, as well as earthquakes and mudslides. He pointed out that China’s water authorities had previously proved themselves to be slow or incapable of reacting adequately to drought in the south-west.
Tao Zuyu urged the Shuotian team to take heed of international lessons: the former Soviet Union once transferred water to Kazakhstan, but ended up turning the local soil salty. The colonisers of America planted grain on land once used for grazing – and caused desertification. “We must respect nature,” Tao said.
Zhou Wei is assistant editor in chinadialogue’s Beijing office.

The Waters of the Third Pole

This report The Waters of the Third Pole prepared by Aon Benfi eld UCL (Hazard Research Centre, University College London), China Dialogue, Humanitarian Futures Programme (King’s College London) has an interesting annexe. 
It says: "The following stories are not necessarily intended to approximate reality, but this approach can be used to challenge conventional thinking and to enable policy- and decision-makers to think ‘out of the box’."
Is this scenario so improbable? 


China’s water, 2020–2025: scarcity, pollution and conflict
Over the past decade, the Chinese government has failed to address underlying structural issues in domestic water allocation, develop adequate systems of water pricing and rights, curb waste or allow water trading. Instead, government response has been to rely on water-transfer projects and to limit water allocations to provinces, rather than to promote conservation through regulatory or market mechanisms. By 2020, unregulated economic activity and over-exploitation of limited or contaminated water sources had combined to push China’s water crisis into catastrophic proportions.
Groundwater tables under the northern plain have dried up, or at least sunk so deep that farmers are unable to extract the remaining water. Continued erratic rainfall and rising temperatures have rendered the Yellow River and its major tributaries seasonal resources. The Shiyang River in Gansu has completely disappeared. The oases of the northern plains are particularly reliant on glacier meltwater, and many, like that of Minqin County, have been completely evacuated. The early 2020s saw the water availability per person in the Hai, Huai, and Yellow (Huang) river basins fall well below 500m3/year, less than the minimum for human existence. In this former breadbasket, desertification continues to overwhelm arable land. Dwindling glaciers have caused the Gobi desert to encroach further upon the oases in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Desertification now affects 600 million people, nearly half the country’s population.
Policies of state-directed environmental migration have now relocated 3 million farmers and nomadic herders in Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu to Xingjiang and Inner Mongolia. This is having enormous environmental and social repercussions since these now-arid destinations themselves are unable to provide adequate support for increasing populations and there is not enough arable land for migrants to sustain new livelihoods. Ethnic tensions have been escalating in China’s western hinterlands, with increasing violence. These incidents culminated in a series of savage riots that spread from Hohot, Lhasa and Urumqi throughout urban centres in the region in June 2020.
Conflict driven by water stress
As the summer of 2020 progressed, severe droughts, worse even than in 2019, threatened to drive the 200 million inhabitants of the North China plain into potential starvation, and the army is enforcing water rationing in the overrun cities of Beijing and Tianjin. In the run-up to the National People’s Congress in October 2020, the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced the launch of the construction of the western section of the South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), aimed at increasing crop production in the Gobi desert and easing over-crowding in the east. In an attempt to gain popular support as the national water crisis accelerated, the Chinese leaders disregarded international agreements and abandoned any effort to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment – despite the serious pollution associated with construction of the central section of the project.
India–China relations have been at an all-time low since the completion of the 40,000MW dam at the ‘Great Bend’ of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River in 2019, harnessing the power of the deepest canyon in the world. This far exceeds the scale of projects such as the Three Gorges Dam, and the Indians claim that maximum river flow has already been reduced by 20%, while the Chinese refute such accusations. On 1 October 2025, Chinese National Day, Chandra Singh, the Indian President announced that, unless China discontinued water-transfer plans, India would make an official declaration of war. In the first weeks of October, India deployed an extra 60,000 troops in the border area and strengthened air defence in Ladakh. Seemingly, uncontrolled skirmishes broke out between troops on the border, resulting in casualties on both sides. Chinese internal conflicts over water allocation and pollution were so widespread that the threat to national security provided a useful focus for the government as it aimed to encourage patriotic unity against a common enemy.
Chinese troops were deployed to quell rising dissent within Tibet about environmental damage caused by mega-infrastructure projects. Chinese nuclear missile deployment in Haiyun and Da Qaidam in Qinghai province was confirmed, but the international community remained powerless. No bilateral agreement was ever reached between India and China after the memorandum of agreement to share hydrology data in 2002 degenerated into a means for China to exhort payment from India in return for often-dubious information. Attempts by NGOs to establish an international dialogue and roadmap towards a ‘benefit-sharing’ agreement have failed, and the international community can only watch and wait.
In the face of these Chinese actions, India has pursued its own grand plans. By 2019 a canal had been constructed to move water from the upper parts of the Ganges, Yamuna and Brahmaputra Rivers westward, ending in the Luni and Sabarmati Rivers in Rajasthan and Gujarat. This diverts water away from the Ganges, a few kilometres from the India–Bangladesh border. The immense levels of construction along the river severely affected the flow of water downstream in Bangladesh. Stagnant reservoirs have led to high levels of toxic algae and bacteria that Bangladesh claims are now poisoning hundreds of thousands of people.
Destruction of ecosystems and livelihoods
In order to complete the western water-transfer route, China has also diverted water from the Lancang (Upper Mekong) River, and a series of 15 cascading dams has been completed. The 292-metre Xiaowan dam is now the world’s tallest, as high as the Eiffel Tower. The reservoir behind the dam has grown to 102 miles long. At the same time Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia have all been pursuing their equally destructive dam projects, violating international standards concerning both environmental and social issues. The Mekong River Commission dissolved in 2015, after failing to play any role in regional facilitation or to prevent dangerous dam-construction projects.
Dramatic changes to the river’s unique cycle of flood and drought – the annual flood pulse – have wrecked the delicate ecosystem of the region. In the waters of the Mekong that used to sustain the world’s second-largest inland fishery, most fish species are now threatened with extinction and the 60 million people who use the river as a source of food or livelihood are struggling for survival. Cambodia’s great central lake, Tonle Sap, the nursery of the lower Mekong’s fish stocks, used to fill up in monsoon season with a fifth of the Mekong’s waters. In 2025 it has become barely seasonal, and the loss of livelihood pushes another 15% of Cambodians below the poverty line and endangers many more.
On 7 September 2030, severe monsoon floods deluged 1.4 million hectares of land in the Mekong Delta, affecting 14.2 million people in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Vietnamese government’s ‘living with floods’ programme of the 2010s, to resettle people living in vulnerable zones, has failed due to lack of funding. Thus 5.3 million people in An Giang, Dong Thap and Tien Giang provinces have been driven out of the Mekong and the Red River Deltas. Climate refugees have swelled the population of Ho Chi Minh City, and Cambodia attempted to shut its borders in panic.
As regional dialogue reached a deadlock over dam building, there are no regional mechanisms in place to cope with a humanitarian disaster of this massive scale. Moreover, hugely expensive construction of dams and reinforcement of thousands of miles of dikes built after the Commission collapsed in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam will exacerbate the disaster in its aftermath. Barriers inhibit the self-cleansing mechanism of rivers and trap millions of cubic yards of industrial waste, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of industrial rubbish, and millions of tonnes of pesticides and fertiliser from fish and shrimp farms. The livelihoods and lives of the approximately 30 million inhabitants of the Mekong Delta are under long-term threat.